“At the end of a fortnight he sailed for Carbonear.  He returned as I was making ready for the summer trip, and laid a scheme before me that took my breath away.  He had spoken to Mr. Atchison, the junior partner, and engaged a schooner, the Willing Mind; likewise a crew.  I was to command her, being the only one of the lot that understood navigation.  For the crew he had picked up a mixed lot at Carbonear and St. John’s—­good seamen, but mostly unknown to one another.  They were the less likely, he said, to smell out our purpose until we reached the island, and for the rest I might trust to him.  He had laid our plans before Mr. Atchison, who approved.  If I listened to him without arguing, he would make my fortune and my sister’s as well.

“I had never met a man of his quality before.  I was a young fool, yet not altogether such a fool but I had persuaded my sister to hand the map over to me, and wore it always about me.  She told me that she had shown it twice to Martin, but never for more than two minutes at a time, and had never let it go out of her hands.  I wonder now that he didn’t murder her for it; and the only reason must be that he reckoned to use me for navigating the ship, and then to get rid of me.

“A fool I was even to the extent of letting him talk me over when I found he had engaged twelve hands for the cruise.  There was no reason on earth for this number except that these were the gang after the treasure, and that he was playing with the lot of them, same as with me.

“The upshot was that we said goodbye to my mother and sister, and crossed over to Carbonear, where I made acquaintance with my crew.  The number of them raised no suspicion in the port, because it was taken for granted the Willing Mind, an old salt ship, was bound for St. Jago, where ten or a dozen hands are nothing unusual to work the salt; and this was the argument he had used to make me carry so many.  Our pretence was we were all bound for St. Jago, and the crew seemed to take this for understood.  I didn’t like their looks.  Martin said they were an ignorant lot, and chosen for that reason.  All I had to do was to run south, and he undertook to give them the slip at the first point we touched.

“He had a wonderful command over them, considering that he was but one plotter in a dozen; and for reasons of his own he kept them off me and the map.  On our way he proposed to me that I should teach him a little navigation; helped me take the reckonings; and picked it up as easy as a child learns its letters.  But his keeping watch over me and the map was what broke up the crew’s patience.  I was holding the schooner straight down for the Gulf of Honduras, and, by my reckoning, within a few hours of making a landfall, wondering all the while that they took the courses I laid without grumbling—­though by this time our course was past all explaining—­when the quarrel broke out.

“I was standing by the wheel with a seaman, Dick Hayling by name, a civil fellow, and more to my liking than the most of them, when we heard a racket in the forecastle, and by-and-by Martin—­he was too fond, to my taste of going down into the forecastle and making free with the men—­comes up the hatchway, very serious, with half a dozen behind him.