Shadowland (Sep 1919-Feb 1920)

Treasure Island SwA.DQWL.ANO such menaces to this nirvana as Long John Silver and the casually murderous Black Dog. They, too, had come for treasure to Treasure Island. Jim learnt patience on Treasure Island. He learnt that adventure, even desert islands containing buried treasure, is not all zest and thrill and nightmare, but shudderingly delicious activity. There are slower, surer lessons to be learnt. It took, for instance, quite some time for Jim to make Ben Gunn understand that there were three very good, very kind, very unbloodthirsty men on the island, named, respectively, the doctor. Squire Livesay and Captain Smollett. Ben seemed to be instinctively distrustful. Considering his own private and personal experiences with Pew and Black Dog, not to mention pale, thumping Long John, Jim did not wonder. He felt that he thoroly comprehended poor, blurred Ben Gunn. After the distrust wore thru the little boy and the half-crazed, ancient pirate grew to be comrades, Ben Gunn admitted to a knowledge of the buried treasure. He intimated to Jim that he had, in the course of his long and lonely stay on the island, dug it up and reburied it. The chart, he gave Jim to understand, would not, in this event, be correct. Jim sighed, relievedly. He had a rather sound belief that Long John Silver would have, by now, become possessor of the chart. It would need searching for still, tho, Ben asserted. He was certain, sure. Jim gave himself up to contemplation. He did not want to attempt the impossible and ruin this shining possibility as impersonated by Ben Gunn. Who could tell what disaster might befall if he should undertake to search for the treasure alone, with Ben Gunn. The thing to do, he felt, was to find the doctor, the squire and Captain Smollett. Take Ben Gunn to them. They could question Ben. Together the great adventure might be achieved. Ben Gunn gave Jim a sort of vicarious courage to augment the natural fund he had acquired. Then, too, there was the goad and spur of one who had, with his own hands, beheld the treasure and buried it, not once, but twice. It was no longer a glamorously storied thing such as had made fearful and resplendent the rafters of the old Admiral Benbow, but solid gold and glittering gems, hard as the earth from which they had been disemboweled, seen and touched by the hand of man. There is no track of time on Treasure Island and Jim never reckoned just how long it took him and Ben Gunn to find the odd-looking stockade in which the squire, the doctor and Captain Smollett, {Continued from page 63) with three good men and true, had entrenched themselves, mourning Jim, meanwhile, for lost and bewailing the news they would have to convoy back to the Widow Hawkins in the old Benbow. Jim never was more royally received. He could have sworn he saw tears in the doctor's eyes ; but then, the doctor was inclined to be mellow. He had, after all, a sentimental recollection, no doubt — of ushering Jim into a stormy world on a stormy night at the Admiral Benbow. He didn't forget that night, it would seem, nor the fearful and, so he acclaimed, cannibalistic cries issued by young Jim. There was, in the stockade, a great deal of rather excitable explaining. Jim listened, agape, to the frightful encounters his friends had had with the buccaneers, to, it seemed, the almost complete extinction of the mutinied men. Long John Silver, it seemed, had, almost alone, survived. He was still ugly, but, thought the squire, relenting inch by inch. "Long John," he told Jim, "is a hard hand." Ben Gunn, on Jim's part, had to be explained. When he had done and a few questions put by Captain Smollett seemed to establish the absolute authenticity of Ben Gunn, Jim was again acclaimed. It was conceded to him that he had done right to stow away on the Hispianola. Without him, no doubt, the treasure of the defunct Flint would have been left within the breast of Treasure Island. Jim knew all this before; still it was seasonable and good to hear it affirmed by these worthy men and true. It inflated confidence. Ben Gunn gave rather more explicit directions to the doctor than he had to Jim. He told the doctor, too, that he had been with Flint on his last voyage and had been marooned there by him that no word of the hidden treasure might ever reach the outer world. His mates had died, one by one, or been killed in the last mutiny. He alone had survived. He told, too, how he had disinterred the treasure from its charted spot so that, if any one of the former expedition should return, he would never find the loot where they had put it. He alone knew the secret of Treasure Island. And to the lad, here, and the kind men he would show the way. The sun shone high and bright on the morning following Jim's arrival at the stockade. It was a tremendous day. There was, to Jim, at least, a sort of hard, bright scintillation to it. A culmination of his little-boy, manifold dreams was coming true. Best of all, it was coming true partly thru himself, his own courage, his own personal adventure. He had discovered the perfidy of Long John Silver and saved them all from death. He had discovered Ben Gunn, within whose muddled brain the secret lay and had been, mostly by him, ferreted forth and given to the light of day. Back of all that, he had made friends with poor Billy Bones and caught the first intimation of Treasure Island. The digging of the treasure was the denouement. The oaths, the exclamations of amazement and almost incredulity from the doctor, the squire and Captain Smollett were music to Jim's ears. The casks, the gold and silver, the English, French, Portuguese and Spanish doubloons, guineas, moidores and sequins. The strange Oriental pieces, richly yellow, the handfuls of jewels, emeralds and rubies and opals and sapphires, round pieces of money and square and oblong, drifting thru the fingers of the searchers like so many multi-hued autumn leaves, the pictures of ancient kings stamped upon them ; the broideries, the tapestries, the pillage of the largesse of all the kingdoms of the earth. "There is enough here," said the squire, mopping his sweated brow, "to make paupers kings and kings mad sybarites." "There is enough here,," said the doctor, "to make want forever unknown among such people as Ave all here frequent." "And to give the Widow Hawkins and her son," added Captain Smollett, "such an ease as they had never dreamed of. "Most of it must go to Jim," said the squire. 'Aye to that," concurred the others, and . . . "Oh, no!" said Jim; "the adventure has been the best part of it all." Two days later, heavily laden, the Hispianola sailed back for the rocky coast and the old Admiral Benbow Inn. Jim, triumphant, sat astern and held distinguished confab with a subdued and highly docile Long John Silver. He promised him, the doctor overheard, s fortune that he might forsake the evil ol his ways. "That he wont do," the doctor said and laughed, "but we're cheaply rid ol him at any price." At the Admiral Benbow the fortune was divided up among them, and some spent wisely and some spent foolishly each according to his way, but the fraught richness of the dream of Treasure Island stayed with Jim Hawkins lon£ after boyhood was itself bygone and a dream. Page Seventy-One