Chapter 5: The Last of the Blind Man
It turns out that, yes, the blind man has summoned reinforcements—a half-dozen or so men, two of them gripping his arms as they dash in together. The blind man is clearly in charge, and he starts shouting orders at the others, demanding at first to break the door of the inn down, and then to search the sea-chest. For the next few minutes, Jim can only narrate based on what he hears the sailors say.
When they find the money Mrs. Hawkins had left behind, the blind man ignores it; whatever he's looking for must be far more valuable. But when whatever it is doesn't turn up, he orders the place ransacked in search of the Hawkinses. After a fruitless search, a nearby lookout sounds the warning whistle, and one of the sailors begs the blind man to just take the money and leave... but he gets so infuriated at this suggestion that he starts beating them all with his walking stick.
Another warning sounds—this time a gunshot—which must be a last-ditch signal, because it's accompanied by the sound of hoofbeats from the other side of the ridge. The crew takes off, leaving the blind man behind; and as a handful of riders crest the hill, the blind man has no choice but to flee on his own. In his haste to escape the road, he trips and falls into a ditch. He recovers, but he's scrambled from the spill and in so much of a hurry that he actually runs back into the road, right into the path of the horses. He is trampled, and moves no more.
Jim finds that one of the boys from the hamlet had the bright idea to go ride and fetch Doctor Livesey, and by chance happened to encounter this bunch of IRS agents traveling along the road, who I guess technically count as government officials and thus will do in a pinch. Though I have a difficult time imagining a group of modern-day auditors going into SWAT mode at a moment's notice to chase down tax evaders. They must have been built different back then.
As Jim and his mother regroup at the inn, we are told the following:
In the meantime the supervisor rode on, as fast as he could, to Kitt’s Hole; but his men had to dismount and grope down the dingle...
After I stopped giggling like a schoolchild, I realized that I had no earthly idea what this line was even saying, and it took me a solid ten minutes, two dictionary lookups, and backtracking a chapter to parse what the hell was happening here. There was a single line in Chapter 4 that briefly alluded to the arrival of a lugger at Kitt's Hole (wherever or whatever that is), which I had completely glossed over after mentally discounting "lugger" as a nonsense word. Uh, it turns out it's actually a type of ship, which, you know, makes that information kind of important, but I digress.
So the IRS agents had already been on their way to investigate the boat at 7 in the evening anyway when the kid from the hamlet encountered them; and after the incident with the blind man, they tried to chase the crew down before they could get back to the ship, but their horses couldn't make it down the embankments to the water quickly. Thus, the perpetrators got away. No need to thank me, confused/disinterested high school students. Just be sure to share Skep's Place with all your friends.
Jim evaluates the state of the inn, and it doesn't look good. The thugs had caused a lot of property damage in their frantic search for the Hawkinses, and they'd taken what was left in the captain's coinpurse as well as the cash from the inn's register. Since GoFundMe doesn't exist yet, Jim realizes there's no way he and his mother will ever financially recover from this. Which... I hate to say I told you so, Jim, but you really would have been better off just leaving the chest on the front stoop and locking the door for the night.
Given that the only things he and his mother removed from the chest were some coins and that random bundle of oilcloth-wrapped papers, and the blind man hadn't seemed interested in the coins, Jim reasons that they must have been after the papers. He decides that in this moment of family calamity he should probably leave his mother alone among the wreckage to go turn the papers in to Doctor Livesey. The supervising auditor says, that's cool, we probably need to report to him anyway because people start asking uncomfortable questions when men die at the hands of an IRS agent. Want a ride?