Treasure Island

Our story today comes from Scotland, written down by a master of adventure named Robert Louis Stevenson in the 19th century. It is a tale that has been told in many ways, by many voices, across many years, but its heart remains as wild and salt swept as the rocky cliffs where it begins. If you had walked into the parlor of the Admiral Benbow Inn on any windy night during my boyhood, you would have found the air thick with the smell of stale sea coal, wet woolen cloaks, and cheap tobacco. The inn stood on the cliffs of Black Hill Cove, a lonely, storm-beaten stretch of the English coast, where the waves roared against the rocks like distant cannon fire. My mother and father ran the place, but because my father was sick and growing weaker by the day, most of the hard work fell to me, Jim Hawkins. It was a quiet life until the day the old captain arrived. He was a heavy, brown-skinned man with a dirty blue coat and a jagged white scar across one cheek. I can still see him looking around the cove and whistling to himself as he blew through his nose like a fog horn. He carried his brass telescope under his arm, and behind him on a handbarrow came his heavy sea chest. He was a silent man by day, but by night, after he had drunk too much rum, he would sit by the fire and sing his old wild sea song. 15 men on the dead man's chest. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. Drink and the devil had done for the rest. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. The neighbors loved him in a frightened sort of way, for his stories of the Spanish main, of wild storms, and of wicked hanging places. But he lived in a constant trembling terror. Soon after his arrival, he took me aside and promised me a silver four-penny piece on the first of every month, if I would only keep my eye open for a seafaring man with one leg, and let him know the moment such a person appeared. How that one-legged man haunted my dreams. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the inn, I saw him in a thousand shapes. Sometimes his leg was cut off at the knee, sometimes at the hip. Sometimes he was a monstrous creature who could run like the wind on his single crutch. But as it turned out, the one-legged man was not the first to arrive. The first was a pale, tallowy creature named Black Dog, who had two fingers missing from his left hand. He and the captain had a terrible whispering argument in the parlor that ended in a clash of cutlasses and a shower of broken glass. Black Dog fled into the rain, bleeding from the shoulder, leaving the captain gasping on the floor, his face a dark, dangerous purple. Our village doctor, Dr. Livesy, came to tend to my ailing father, and ended up saving the captain's life as well, warning him that another drop of rum would be his death. But the captain would not listen. He was trapped in a cage of his own secrets. The final blow came on a bitter, frosty afternoon. I was standing at the door of the inn, still weeping for my poor father, who had died only the night before, when I heard the tap, tap, tapping of a stick on the frozen road. Out of the mist came a blind man, wrapped in a tattered cloak with a green shade over his eyes. He was a hunched, dreadful figure. When he reached the door, he caught my hand in a grip of iron. "Lead me to the captain," he whispered, and his voice was cold and hollow. I was too frightened to resist. I led him into the parlor where the captain sat, dazed with rum. The blind man stepped close, pressed something into the captain's open palm, and then, with a speed that defied his blindness, skipped out the door and down the road. I heard his…

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