“That was how the rum took him,” added Merry. “Blue! well I reckon he was blue. That’s a true word.”
Ever since they had found the skeleton and got upon this train of thought, they had spoken lower and lower, and they had almost got to whispering by now, so that the sound of their talk hardly interrupted the silence of the wood. All of a sudden, out of the middle of the trees in front of us, a thin, high, trembling voice struck up the well-known air and words:
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”
I never have seen men more dreadfully affected than the pirates. The color went from their six faces like enchantment; some leaped to their feet, some clawed hold of others; Morgan groveled on the ground.
“It’s Flint, by ⸻!” cried Merry.
The song had stopped as suddenly as it began—broken off, you would have said, in the middle of a note, as though someone had laid his hand upon the singer’s mouth. Coming so far through the clear, sunny atmosphere among the green treetops, I thought it had sounded airily and sweetly, and the effect on my companions was the stranger.
“Come,” said Silver, struggling with his ashen lips to get the word out, “that won’t do. Stand by to go about. This is a rum start, and I can’t name the voice, but it’s someone skylarking—someone that’s flesh and blood, and you may lay to that.”
His courage had come back as he spoke, and some of the color to his face along with it. Already the others had begun to lend an ear to this encouragement, and were coming a little to themselves, when the same voice broke out again—not this time singing, but in a faint, distant hail, that echoed yet fainter among the clefts of the Spy-glass.