One day, the narrator went to visit his friend William Legrand, a man who had no family and

lived in a small wooden cottage on Sullivan’s island with his servant, Jupiter. When he got to the
cottage, there was nobody so he decided to light a fire and wait for them to come. Legrand and
Jupiter came back and they told him they had found an unusual bug. He couldn’t show it to him
because he had given it to Gray to study it but he could draw it on a piece of paper he had also
found on the beach while fishing. As it was late and dark, the narrator went closer to the fire to
see the drawing more clearly. He saw that the insect had a pattern of a skull but he also saw
some writing in red ink. It was strange. He told William about it and from that moment on, he
didn’t speak a word. So, the narrator came back home to Charleston.

About a month later, Jupiter came to see the narrator to town. He was saying that William
was sick and behaved strangely. He also had a note for the narrator.

The narrator and Jupiter went to the island immediately. There William showed him the gold
beetle and explained that he had studied the bug and the paper and they were clues to find
something very important. So, they started a journey by boat following those clues until they
got to a tall cliff. Jupiter had to climb a tall tree and found a skull. He had to drop the bug into
the left eye of the skull and when the bug fell to the ground, they measured fifty feet from the
tree. Once they got there, Legrand stopped and started digging. First, they found human bones,
old coins and finally a wonderful treasure – gold and silver coins and beautiful jewels. Exhausted
but happy, they took the treasure to the island. They were now rich. The next day, Legrand told
the narrator how he knew about the treasure. He had paid attention to the old paper and he
had deciphered the code and understood the message. Each number represented a letter. He
had started with the number 8, which appeared 41 times, and the letter E is the most common
letter in the English language. He also understood the pictures of the skull (a pirate symbol) and
the goat (Captain Kidd’s name – the word for a young goat is a KID).