He jumped up, writhing and twisting in an excess of embarrassment, aye, and with something of fear in his face.
"'Twas yourself was promisin' me I'd not ha' to wear a livery-shuit," he protested. "And before that ye said as how ye'd find me a berth as a real, tarry sailor-man, a-pullin' on ropes and standin' tricks at the wheel. Yes, ye did, Master Ormerod; and I believed ye, I did—though there's a many think naught o' foolin' poor Ben Gunn."
"I'll not fool you, Ben," I answered. "If you would go to sea, to sea shall you go."
And on the morrow I found him a berth upon a Barbados packet, cautioning him to employ discretion in discussing his past life, lest he be handed over to the Admiralty officials as a former pirate. He was our last link with the infamous company that had owned the joint rule of my great-uncle and John Flint, and what became of him or of the remnants of Flint's crew aboard the Walrus I do not know to this day. But from the fact that the Walrus was never reported again I have suspected that she must either have been wrecked or voluntarily abandoned by her people. She left Savannah within twenty-four hours of our landing there—so much I discovered by correspondence with a merchant of that town.
Did she put back to the Rendezvous and ransack the island's surface for the treasure Flint had buried? Or did she try for the gold we concealed on the Dead Man's Chest? Hopeless ventures, either of the two! As well search for a certain grain of corn in a heaping bin.
And what happened to Bill Bones? Did he elude the pursuit of his deserted comrades and seek an opportunity to lift Flint's treasure for himself? I'll swear that was his intent from the first—precisely as I'll take oath that had Silver been first to get his hands upon Flint's map he would have plotted so that only he and a small circle of his immediate familiars should have shared in the prize. Ruthless scoundrels, one and all! But perhaps Bones never won clear. Perhaps Silver fastened upon his trail and pursued him with that fantastic vengeance they called the Black Spot. I have often wondered what it might be.
As to the treasure, they are welcome to it or any part of it if they can find it. Moira and I talked over the desirability of notifying her Jacobite friends of the hoard that was buried on the Dead Man's Chest, and for a time she leaned toward this course; but after she had dwelt a while in the Hanoverian prosperity of New York she revolted against the idea of taking any step which would embroil the peace of the realm, and any lingering doubts in her mind were dissipated by the titanic conflict of the Seven Years' War, with its world-wide convulsion of nations that set armies marching to battle all the way from the parched plains of India to the forests of our wilderness country.
"Here is no time to think of Hanoverian or Jacobite," said she. "We will all be English together."
"Der Irish, too?" asked Peter gravely.
"Troth, the Irish will be the best English!" she cried. "Unless it be the Dutch."