We hurried through the woods toward the stockade, and with every step the pirates’ voices came nearer. Soon we could hear their feet running and branches breaking.
“Captain,” I said, “Trelawney is the best shot. Give him your gun; his own is wet.”
They changed guns, and I gave my cutlass to Gray, who had no weapon. It did us all good to see him spit in his hand and swing the blade through the air.
We came out of the wood just by the fence, and at almost the same moment seven pirates, with Job Anderson, the boatswain, at their head, came running round the corner. They stopped in surprise, and before they could recover, the squire and I fired, and so did Hunter and Joyce from the log house. One of the pirates fell, and the rest ran back into the trees. He was dead, shot through the heart.
We were beginning to feel pleased with ourselves when a pistol fired in the bushes. A ball flew close past my ear, and poor old Redruth fell to the ground. I saw at once that it was all over for him. We lifted him over the fence and carried him, bleeding, into the log house.
Poor old man! From the beginning of our troubles he had never complained. He had followed every order silently and well. He was the oldest of us by twenty years, and now he was the one who had to die.
The squire fell on his knees beside him and kissed his hand, crying like a child.
“Am I going, doctor?” Redruth asked.
“Redruth, my man,” I said, “you’re going home.”
“I wish I’d had a shot at them with the gun first,” he answered.
“Redruth,” said the squire, “say you forgive me, won’t you?”
“Is it right for a servant to forgive his master, squire?” he said. “But so be it, amen!”
After a little silence he asked if somebody would read a prayer. “It’s the custom, sir,” he said. And soon after, without another word, he died.
Meanwhile the captain had taken many useful things out of his big pockets: the British flag, a Bible, a rope, pen and ink, and the logbook. With Hunter’s help he set up a long pole at a corner of the log house, climbed on the roof and raised the flag with his own hands. When Redruth died, he laid another flag gently over the body. Then he took me aside.
“Dr. Livesey, in how many weeks do you expect help from home?”
I told him it was not a question of weeks but of months. If we were not back by the end of August, Blandly would send a ship to find us, but not sooner.
“It’s a pity we lost that second load,” said the captain. “We have enough powder, but the food is short, very short.”
Just then, with a roar, a cannon ball flew high over the roof of the log house and fell far beyond us in the woods.
“Fire away, my lads!” said the captain. “You don’t have much powder.”
“Captain,” said the squire, “they can’t see the house from the ship. They must be aiming at the flag. Wouldn’t it be wiser to take it down?”
“Take down my flag?” cried the captain. “No, sir, not I!”
We all agreed with him. It showed our enemies that we did not care about their cannon. All evening they kept firing. One ball came in through the roof and went out through the floor, but most of them buried themselves in the soft sand, and we soon got used to them.
“There’s one good thing about all this,” said the captain. “The tide has gone out, so our stores should be out of the water. Who will go and bring in the pork?”
Gray and Hunter went out well armed, but they came back with nothing. Four or five pirates were already carrying our stores to one of their boats, with Silver giving orders. And every one of them now had a gun from some secret store of their own.
The captain sat down to write in his logbook. He wrote the names of all who were left loyal to him, and that they had come ashore with food for ten days and raised the British flag on Treasure Island. Then he wrote: “Thomas Redruth, shot by the mutineers. James Hawkins, cabin boy—”
And I was wondering what had happened to poor Jim Hawkins.
Then a shout came from outside.
“Doctor! Squire! Captain! Hello, Hunter, is that you?”
I ran to the door just in time to see Jim Hawkins, safe and sound, climbing over the fence.