In the second chapter ("Black Dog Appears and Disappears") a stranger arrives one January morning while the captain is on the beach with his telescope and Jim is readying the breakfast table. The stranger asks if "his mate Bill" is there, and Jim tells him he knows no one by that name, that he is preparing the table for "the captain." Jim feels that this person means the captain no good, and he starts out to warn their guest, but the man prevents him from leaving. When the captain approaches, he reacts to the stranger with a kind of sickly fear, addressing him as "Black Dog." Black Dog orders Jim to bring him rum and then leave the room, and although Jim tries to overhear their conversation, he can make out nothing until suddenly there's a great crash and a clash of swords. He runs back in, just in time to see Black Dog, wounded, hurrying away. The captain seems greatly upset, demands rum, and says he must leave the inn. But before anything else can happen, he falls down unconscious. Soon the doctor arrives and tells Jim and his mother that the old man has had a stroke. He gets Jim to help him treat the captain, who eventually recovers consciousness. Livesey tells him that unless he stops drinking immediately he'll have another stroke, which will kill him.
Chapter 3 ("The Black Spot") begins later that day. When the captain hears he has been ordered to stay in bed for a week, he declares that this will be impossible. Black Dog and others worse than he will return, wanting to steal his sea chest. They will give him "the black spot," which he says is a summons. When they come, he says, Jim must get Dr. Livesey to call down the law on them. He explains very little, but says these men are "old Flint's crew," that he himself was Flint's first mate, and that Flint gave him something — he does not say what — before he died. Then the captain takes the medicine the doctor left for him and sleeps.
