A boy sorting through a dead lodger's sea-chest at his mother's inn comes away with a map, and with it a berth aboard a schooner bound for an island where a pirate's fortune lies buried. The ship's affable one-legged cook turns out to be the very man the honest men should have feared most, and somewhere between the apple-barrel and the stockade the boy learns that charm and murder can share a face. Stevenson wrote it to please a stepson on a rainy holiday, and in the doing fixed for good the furniture of every pirate tale since — the black spot, the map with its X, the parrot on the shoulder, the one-legged rogue you can't help but like.