“Mates,” says he, “there’s two of them alone there; one’s the old cripple that brought us all here and blundered us down to this; the other’s that cub that I mean to have the heart of. Now, mates--” He was raising his arm and his voice, and plainly meant to lead a charge. But just then--crack! crack! crack!--three musket-shots flashed out of the thicket. Merry tumbled head foremost into the excavation; the man with the bandage spun round like a teetotum and fell all his length upon his side, where he lay dead, but still twitching; and the other three turned and ran for it with all their might. Before you could wink, Long John had fired two barrels of a pistol into the struggling Merry, and as the man rolled up his eyes at him in the last agony, “George,” said he, “I reckon I settled you.” At the same moment, the doctor, Gray, and Ben Gunn joined us, with smoking muskets, from among the nutmeg-trees. “Forward!” cried the doctor. “Double quick, my lads. We must head ’em off the boats.” And we set off at a great pace, sometimes plunging through the bushes to the chest. I tell you, but Silver was anxious to keep up with us. The work that man went through, leaping on his crutch till the muscles of his chest were fit to burst, was work no sound man ever equalled; and so thinks the doctor. As it was, he was already thirty yards behind us and on the verge of strangling when we reached the brow of the slope. “Doctor,” he hailed, “see there! No hurry!” Sure enough there was no hurry. In a more open part of the plateau, we could see the three survivors still running in the same direction as they had started, right for Mizzenmast Hill. We were already between them and the boats; and so we four sat down to breathe, while Long John, mopping his face, came slowly up with us. “Thank ye kindly, doctor,” says he. “You came in in about the nick, I guess, for me and Hawkins. And so it’s you, Ben Gunn!” he added. “Well, you’re a nice one, to be sure.” “I’m Ben Gunn, I am,” replied the maroon, wriggling like an eel in his embarrassment. “And,” he added, after a long pause, “how do, Mr. Silver? Pretty well, I thank ye, says you.” “Ben, Ben,” murmured Silver, “to think as you’ve done me!” The doctor sent back Gray for one of the pick-axes deserted, in their flight, by the mutineers, and then as we proceeded leisurely downhill to where the boats were lying, related in a few words what had taken place. It was a story that profoundly interested Silver; and Ben Gunn, the half-idiot maroon, was the hero from beginning to end.