“By the powers, Ben Gunn!” roared Silver.

“Aye, and so it were,” cried Morgan, springing on his knees.  “Ben Gunn it were!”

“It don’t make much odds, do it, now?” asked Dick.  “Ben Gunn’s not here in the body any more’n Flint.”

But the older hands greeted this remark with scorn.

“Why, nobody minds Ben Gunn,” cried Merry; “dead or alive, nobody minds him.”

It was extraordinary how their spirits had returned and how the natural colour had revived in their faces.  Soon they were chatting together, with intervals of listening; and not long after, hearing no further sound, they shouldered the tools and set forth again, Merry walking first with Silver’s compass to keep them on the right line with Skeleton Island.  He had said the truth:  dead or alive, nobody minded Ben Gunn.

Dick alone still held his Bible, and looked around him as he went, with fearful glances; but he found no sympathy, and Silver even joked him on his precautions.

“I told you,” said he—­“I told you you had sp’iled your Bible.  If it ain’t no good to swear by, what do you suppose a sperrit would give for it?  Not that!” and he snapped his big fingers, halting a moment on his crutch.

But Dick was not to be comforted; indeed, it was soon plain to me that the lad was falling sick; hastened by heat, exhaustion, and the shock of his alarm, the fever, predicted by Dr. Livesey, was evidently growing swiftly higher.

It was fine open walking here, upon the summit; our way lay a little downhill, for, as I have said, the plateau tilted towards the west.  The pines, great and small, grew wide apart; and even between the clumps of nutmeg and azalea, wide open spaces baked in the hot sunshine.  Striking, as we did, pretty near north-west across the island, we drew, on the one hand, ever nearer under the shoulders of the Spy-glass, and on the other, looked ever wider over that western bay where I had once tossed and trembled in the oracle.

The first of the tall trees was reached, and by the bearings proved the wrong one.  So with the second.  The third rose nearly two hundred feet into the air above a clump of underwood—­a giant of a vegetable, with a red column as big as a cottage, and a wide shadow around in which a company could have manoeuvred.  It was conspicuous far to sea both on the east and west and might have been entered as a sailing mark upon the chart.

But it was not its size that now impressed my companions; it was the knowledge that seven hundred thousand pounds in gold lay somewhere buried below its spreading shadow.  The thought of the money, as they drew nearer, swallowed up their previous terrors.  Their eyes burned in their heads; their feet grew speedier and lighter; their whole soul was found up in that fortune, that whole lifetime of extravagance and pleasure, that lay waiting there for each of them.