Chapter 2: Black Dog Appears and Disappears
A few weeks later, Jim is setting the breakfast table at the inn while the captain is out for a morning stroll. A stranger walks in, wearing a cutlass at his hip and missing two fingers on his left hand. He asks Jim, hey, you setting a table for my friend Bill there?
Now, Jim is fully aware that the captain is trying to lay low and gets real skittish when other sailors come into the inn; in fact, he even has Jim on payroll to be on the lookout for a particular old salt who only has one leg. Yet despite this stranger smelling of the sea and ordering a glass of rum at 9 o'clock in the morning, Jim—who probably hasn't left the inn in his entire life—immediately decides the man can't be a sailor and definitely doesn't have a suspicious number of legs, and thus replies, nope, don't know a Bill. The only person staying here is called "the captain".
This is obviously a bad move, because the man tells Jim, that's my guy; don't blame him for wanting to be called "the captain" over "Bill" though. He then identifies the scar on the captain's cheek, making it crystal clear he's found his target.
"Bill's going to be pleased as punch to see me again," he tells Jim assuredly as he hides behind the front door and prepares to ambush the captain so he can't run away.
The captain is, in fact, decidedly not "pleased as punch" to see the man, who he identifies as Black Dog, which is just an awful name. Simply terrible. Still, since they were shipmates at one time, the captain is at least willing to sit down with the man and hear him out.
Unfortunately, Jim is unable to hear the details of the conversation until it gets heated, at which point the captain vehemently rejects whatever his companion is saying/proposing/etc., and the situation comes to swords. Black Dog, showing all the swagger of a man who willingly goes by the name "Black Dog", immediately takes a slice to the shoulder and bolts for the exit, and the only reason the captain doesn't slice his skull in two is because his cutlass gets stuck in the wooden sign hanging outside above the front door. Black Dog gets away, and the captain returns to the inn.
Where he immediately proceeds to have a stroke.
Fortunately, Dr. Livesey just happens to be stopping in to see Jim's sick dad right at that moment. He rolls his eyes at the captain and says, see you dumbass, I told you to lay off the liquor or this would happen. Still, he begrudgingly assists the captain since it's his job and all, and employs good old 18th century medicine, which is pretty much just bloodletting.
"I have drawn blood enough to keep him quiet awhile," he tells Jim, which Skep interprets as draining him to the point of fainting. Before he goes, he adds that the captain needs to lay off the damn rum already, because another stroke like this will kill him. And don't let him get out of this bed for a week.