When we woke up, the sun was nearly down, and I told Mr. Crusoe we must
hurry to get on board the ship before dark.
“What do you want to go on board the ship to-night for?” he asked.
“Why, to sleep, of course,” said I.
He looked really unhappy, and said, “Mike, I’m afraid you’re not quite
right in your mind. The idea of going back and sleeping on that wreck!
My grandfather slept on shore, and so will we.”
“But there isn’t the least danger in sleeping on board,” said I. “The
ship will stay where she is, unless we get a heavy blow from the
southward.”
Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t so much as answer, but he began to walk around and
look up into all the trees. Presently he said, pointing to a big tree
that was all surrounded with thorn-bushes, “There’s where I’m going to
sleep.”
“But what do you want to sleep in a tree for?” I asked. “If you will
sleep ashore, why don’t you sleep on the sand, where you can be
comfortable?”
“And be eaten up by wild beasts half a dozen times before morning,” he
replied.
I told him that in the first place there were no wild beasts on the
Pacific islands, and that if there were they would not come down to the
beach in the night, but would go where they could get fresh water.
“Michael Flanagan,” answered Mr. Crusoe, “if you only knew what you were
saying you would be sorry. I’ve got to sleep in a tree for this one
night, or else treat my grandfather’s memory with disrespect. Now be
silent, or I shall be angry with you.”
When a man is as obstinate as that, what are you going to do about it? I
just kept quiet, and made up a good bed for myself on the beach, while
Mr. Crusoe tried to climb up the tree. He wouldn’t let me help him,
because nobody helped his old lunatic of a grandfather, and he got two
good falls among the thorns before he got up into the branches, and
wedged himself into a place between two limbs, and said good-night.
It must have been about the middle of the night that he woke me up by
falling down from the tree with an awful crash. He couldn’t get himself
out of the thorn-bushes till I went and helped him, and then it took me
about an hour to pick the thorns out of him. He had had enough of
sleeping in a tree, and was willing to lie down on a mattress like a
Christian; but I heard him groan a good deal before he finally dropped
asleep.
I didn’t say anything to him in the morning about his obstinacy, but I
only asked if all the thorns were out of him. He was quite pleasant, and
said that he didn’t care anything about his fall, because he knew that
he had done his duty. Of course, if he really considered it his duty to
go to sleep in a tree and fall out of it, he did what was right; but I
didn’t consider it my duty to be an idiot because somebody else’s
grandfather was one.
We worked all that day bringing things ashore from the wreck, and must
have brought enough canned provisions to last us for ten years, besides
more flour, beef, pork, and bread. I brought one tremendous load of
boards ashore, for I suppose the captain had expected to pick up a lot
of Chinese passengers somewhere in China, and had brought the boards to
make bunks with.
The last thing I did after we had knocked off work on the wreck was to
cut a top-gallant sail adrift from the wreckage that I had towed ashore.
We made a sort of tent of this, and Mr. Crusoe slept under it without
saying a word. He had had enough of sleeping in trees, and I suppose
that, if the truth was known, one night of that kind of lodging was all
that his grandfather ever wanted.
As the weather looked settled, we agreed to take the next day for
building a house instead of going to the wreck. Mr. Crusoe went to the
hill on the north end of the island, and found the place where his
grandfather used to live. It was a little level spot at the foot of the
hill, where the rock rose up straight for about twenty feet.
“We’ll pitch a tent right against the rock,” said he, “and we’ll
surround it with a fence made by driving stakes into the ground close
together, and then we’ll dig a cave in the rock so as to have a cellar.”
“What do you want to live right up against a damp rock for?” I asked.
“So that when the cannibals come to attack us, nobody can get at us from
the back of our castle,” he replied.
“They can’t get up on the hill and drop rocks down on us, and jump down
right into the middle of our house, I suppose?” said I. “What’s the good
of a fence and all that, when you put your house where anybody can jump
down on to the roof of it?”
“Do you pretend to know more than my grandfather?” asked Mr. Crusoe,
looking very fierce.
Of course I had to say I didn’t; and it was true too. I didn’t pretend
to know more than the old man, for I knew I knew more. Why, a boy who
had never been at sea more than two months would have been ashamed to
choose such a place for a house.
“I wonder your grandfather didn’t build his house on the top of the
hill,” I said, after a while. “Of course he had some good reason; but if
he had done it he could have watched for ships, and could have defended
himself against the cannibals—whoever they are.”
But Mr. Crusoe looked so furious that I gave up saying anything more
about the place for the house, and we went to work and pitched the tent.
Then we cut a lot of stakes, and drove them in the ground about two
inches apart, and Mr. Crusoe said they would grow and make a solid wall,
which I didn’t believe. The fence was to be about fifty feet long, and
it took us nearly all day to cut and drive stakes enough to make a piece
of fence six feet long, so I saw we were going to have plenty of work.
We moved all the things into what was to be our front yard, and piled
them up so as to make a wall. Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t leave any open place
in this wall for an entrance, but he knocked together a sort of ladder,
and said we could climb over the wall with it, and then pull it over
after us. He tried it when he had got it finished, but it broke just as
he got to the top of it, and as he fell he knocked down most of the
upper part of the wall, which was made of tin cans, and I had fairly to
dig him out from under them. Then he decided that we needn’t use a
ladder until we had finished our regular fence, and that we might leave
an opening in our wall of barrels and cans. He sometimes showed a little
sense, especially after he had hurt himself.
You should have seen, though, what a rage he got into when I went up on
the hill behind the tent and jumped down into the yard. He told me that
if I ever did it again he should have to make an example of me, and said
that no matter what it might cost, he would do his duty to his
grandfather. Then all of a sudden he got over being angry, and took me
by both hands, and said he loved me, and begged me with tears in his
eyes to do as he wanted me to do. I promised that I would; for,
aggravating as he was, he was good to me, and I was always anxious to
please him.
For the next two weeks I went to the wreck two or three times every day,
and brought ashore no end of things, while Mr. Crusoe worked part of the
time at his fence, and part of the time at making a cave. The rock was
soft and crumbling, and Mr. Crusoe worked his way into it with a
crow-bar at a pretty good rate; but one day, after the cave was about
six feet deep, part of the roof fell in on him, and buried him all but
his head, so deep that he could not move. By good-luck this happened
early in the morning, and I had plenty of time to dig him out. I got him
out after working till long after noon, but all the time I expected the
rock would cave in again and bury us both. After it was all over, Mr.
Crusoe said that the cave was large enough for the present, and that he
would not work any more on it until more important things were attended
to, and in fact he let it alone for good and all.
We got the fence done at last, and made a good stout ladder so as to
climb over it safely. But Mr. Crusoe would have the tops of the stakes
cut to a sharp point, and as he was only a landsman, and couldn’t climb
well, he was continually getting caught on the points; and once, when I
came back from the wreck, I found him hanging with his head down, with
his trousers caught on a sharp stake, and he said he had been hanging
for two hours. After this he sawed off the points at the place where we
climbed over the fence, and was able to keep himself right side up.
He wanted me to cut the ship’s cables into short lengths, and pile them
up inside of the fence so as to strengthen it; but I explained to him
that I couldn’t cut up chain-cables, and that even if I could, the
lengths would be too heavy to bring ashore. His grandfather might have
cut up the cables belonging to his own ship because they were made of
hemp, but I told Mr. Crusoe that ships never carried hemp cables
nowadays. He said it was an outrage, and he would make the owners smart
for it, but all the same he had to give up his idea of strengthening the
fence with cables. However, he dug up a great deal of earth in the front
yard and piled it against the fence, and so made a beautiful hole for
water to collect in whenever it should rain.
We had made loop-holes in the fence to shoot through, and nothing would
satisfy Mr. Crusoe but to mount the rifles on gun-carriages like
cannons, and have them always loaded and pointed out of the loop-holes.
I knew well enough that he must have got this idea from his grandfather,
and it was as ridiculous as most of that foolish old man’s ideas. In the
first place, while the rifles were mounted, you could never hit anybody
with them, unless somebody happened to be directly in front of them;
and, in the second place, they were certain to be ruined by rust. But I
let Mr. Crusoe have his own way with all but two rifles, and those, I
told him, we must keep to carry with us when we went outside of the
fence. He made the most rickety gun-carriages you ever saw, and if he
had fired his rifles only once they would have kicked the carriages all
to pieces. However, he was very proud of his work, and said that now the
place began to look as it must have looked when his grandfather was
there. That very night he thought he heard a noise, and got up and fell
over one gun-carriage, and knocked it over against the next one, and
that one fell against another, so that the whole of them came down, and
one rifle went off of its own accord, and there was “daybreak to
westward” for a few minutes, as Nigger Jim, who was one of the _H. G.
Thompson’s_ crew, was always saying when something extraordinary
happened. The next day he said that he wouldn’t take the time just then
to repair the gun-carriages, and that I might put the rifles in the
tent. I told him that I supposed that rifles were not invented in his
grandfather’s time, and he brightened up and said “that was so,” and
that as we did not have any muskets like those that his grandfather had,
he did not think that it was absolutely necessary for us to mount the
rifles.
One day Mr. Crusoe took a piece of board, and cut on it in large
letters, “I came on shore here on the 18th of September, 1884,” and
nailed it to a big post, and set it up in a hole that he dug for it on
the beach. In the side of the post he cut a notch every day, and a
deeper one every Sunday. This, he said, would be our almanac; though
what is the use of an almanac that does not give you the sun’s
declination, and Greenwich time, and other things that I know you’ve got
to get out of the almanac when you go to work up your observations, I
can’t see.
The curious thing about Mr. Crusoe’s almanac was the way in which it
made the time fly. Whenever Mr. Crusoe hadn’t anything else to do, he
would go and cut two or three weeks of notches on his post. After we had
been on the island only twenty-three days, according to my reckoning,
the post showed that we had been there nearly three months, and Mr.
Crusoe wouldn’t hear a word against it, but always insisted that his
almanac was right. He would say one day, “Mike, we have now been here
ten weeks, and I think we are getting on very slowly with our house” and
the very next day he would say, “We have been here now thirteen weeks
and four days, and our provisions are holding out very well.” I tried at
first to remember the real dates, but Mr. Crusoe got me so confused that
I had to give it up.
We had been ashore, I should think, about six weeks, and had pretty well
stripped the ship of everything that was useful, when Mr. Crusoe
proposed that we should begin to saw the ship into pieces and bring them
ashore. I told him that the first heavy blow from the southward would
bring on a sea that would break her up fast enough, but he would not be
satisfied unless I would saw through every timber and stanchion and
deck-beam. I had to begin it, just to satisfy him, though I knew it was
all foolishness, but by good-luck it turned out that I only had to work
at the job one day.
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