I was pretty tired when night came, after sawing away all day at the
timbers of the wreck, but I didn’t like the looks of the sky, and I told
Mr. Crusoe that it might rain before morning, and we’d better make ready
for it, but he said “Oh no! it wouldn’t rain for at least a month yet,
for the dry season wasn’t over.”
I had knocked up a bunk, that stood about a foot from the ground inside
of the tent, to sleep in; but Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t sleep in a bunk, but
slept on a mattress, with nothing between it and the ground but a
half-inch plank. He had given up his notion that he mustn’t sleep on a
mattress, but I suppose he bargained with his conscience by not sleeping
in a bunk.
Soon after sunset the wind began to blow from the southward, and by the
time we turned in, which was generally about half-past seven, because we
had nothing to do after supper, there was a pretty stiff breeze. It
freshened all through the night, and after a while it began to rain.
I slept soundly enough, but Mr. Crusoe waked me up in the night by
climbing into my bunk and breaking the whole affair down; for I never
meant to make it strong enough to hold two. When it broke down it landed
us into a foot of water; and what, through being waked up so suddenly,
and finding somebody hanging on to me, I couldn’t at first think where I
was, and I had pretty nearly choked Mr. Crusoe to death before I really
understood things.
The rain had run down from the hill into the enclosure where our tent
stood, and as it couldn’t get out, owing to the fence being banked up
with earth, it stayed there. It was, as I said, about a foot deep when I
woke up, and it was getting deeper every minute. The water had roused
Mr. Crusoe up about half an hour before he woke me, and after he had
found it too cold to stand with his feet in the water any longer, he had
tried to sit on the edge of my bunk till morning.
It was raining just as if the tanks that held the rain had burst and let
it all out with a rush, instead of letting it run through a strainer,
and come down in drops, as it generally does. I never saw it rain so
hard before or since, and the water kept rising in our house so fast
that we could see it rise.
My first idea was to knock a hole in the fence and let the water out,
but it took me so long to do it, owing to the solid way in which the
stakes were driven into the ground, that the water was nearer two feet
than one foot deep when I finally managed to let it out. But all of it
wouldn’t run out, for Mr. Crusoe had dug so much earth out of the front
yard that it was lower than the ground outside the fence. As for mud,
the whole place was just one big mud-hole, and when we tried to walk we
kept constantly slipping up and sitting down in the water. So we gave it
up after a while, and went outside and sat in the lee of a rock that
kept a little of the full force of the rain off of us; but for all that,
you could have wrung us both out every ten minutes, and filled a big
bucket with water every time.
Mr. Crusoe felt so cold and miserable that he didn’t want to talk much.
Besides, the wind howled so that we could hardly hear each other. He did
say, however, two or three times, as if he was speaking to himself, “I
can’t make it out; I can’t make it out.”
“What can’t you make out, Mr. Crusoe?” asked I, when the wind lulled a
bit.
“Why, how it was that my grandfather wasn’t drowned out the same as we
have been.”
“Perhaps it didn’t rain,” said I.
“But it did rain; for in my grandfather’s book he mentions a violent
rain.”
“Then you may depend upon it that he got his house full of water, and
went and built another in a better place,” I said, “only he felt ashamed
to mention it.”
“Mike,” said Mr. Crusoe, “while I can’t allow you to talk in that way of
my grandfather, I think you are partly right in what you say, for he did
build another house, which he called his country-house, in a beautiful
valley.”
“And I’ll bet you anything that he lived in his country-house all the
year round, and gave up trying to live in a house right under the
scuppers of a big hill the first time he found his bed all afloat.”
Mr. Crusoe didn’t answer me, so I knew he thought I was right, and after
waiting a while I said,
“In the morning, Mr. Crusoe, if it stops raining, we’ll build a good,
substantial plank house that will keep out the rain, and we’ll put it
where the water will run off of it instead of into it. I’m sure that’s
what your grandfather did when he built his country-house, and we ought
to imitate him.” I just added that little remark to please Mr. Crusoe,
for his grandfather must have been the worst man to imitate that ever
lived. Why, a hand-organ monkey would have too much sense to imitate
him.
Mr. Crusoe said that he was delighted that I was beginning to appreciate
his grandfather, and that we’d build a country-house the first thing
next day.
Well, the storm blew itself out by daylight, but it took a good six
hours for the sea to go down. There wasn’t a particle of the wreck
visible in the morning, for the wind and sea must have worked it off the
beach, and carried it over towards the reef, and it must have sunk in
deep water, for we never saw the first bit of wreckage afterwards. The
spars that I had towed ashore were missing too, but some of them came on
to the beach again at high tide a few days later.
Things were pretty damp in our house, but there was not much of anything
that was really spoiled. The guns and all the iron tools were rusted,
and the mattresses and blankets were soaking, but a little bright
sunshine made them all right. Mr. Crusoe’s cave had caved in again, and
was now spoiled for good; but as we did not intend to live in the house
any longer, Mr. Crusoe didn’t take much interest in the cave. He said
that we would live in our country-house, and keep the first house for a
fort and a place to sleep in now and then.
We spent the morning in getting our things dry, and in the afternoon we
selected a place for our new house, and pitched our tent there. The way
we selected it was this: Mr. Crusoe wanted to go clear over to the other
side of the island, where he said there was a beautiful valley, but I
wanted to build on a little rising ground under some big trees. I got
him to come and look at the place, but before he had begun to find fault
with it he accidentally picked up a flat stone, and found “R. C., 1671,”
scratched on one side of it. He said the letters had been scratched by
his revered grandfather, and that the stone was a sign that we should
build the house just where we stood, which was what I meant the stone to
be when I scratched the letters on it, and dropped it where he could
find it.
As Mr. Crusoe couldn’t remember how his grandfather’s country-house was
built, he let me build the new house to suit myself. I began by setting
four posts in the ground, one for each corner of the house, and then set
other posts between them. To these I nailed planks on the inside of the
house till the four sides were all covered. Then I planted another set
of posts about a foot outside of the first posts, and planked these on
the outside. In this way I had a double shell for the house, and I
filled up the place between the two shells with dry sand rammed down
hard. One side of the house I made four feet higher than the other side,
so that I could make a slanting roof, and I lashed the roof beams to the
upright posts, for I didn’t want the roof to blow off, and I was afraid
to trust to nails.
I left a place for a door, and also for one window two feet square. In
each side of the house I made loop-holes, out of which we could fire in
every direction. The door I made of six thicknesses of one-inch planks,
and swung it on two iron rods that once were pump rods on board the _H.
G. Thompson_. I made a window-shutter as thick as the door, and put
stout wooden rests on each side of the door and window in which I could
put crow-bars, as bars to fasten them. The edges of the planks of the
roof and sides of the house overlapped one another, so that no rain
could get in.
Inside of the house I made two bunks, and put up a lot of shelves, so
that I could put all our small things where they would be dry. The guns
were hung on rests on each side of the house, so that at least one could
always he handy to any one who was looking out of a loop-hole. Of course
I made a good plank floor for the house, and you have no idea how
comfortable and safe it was. Nobody could break open the door when once
we had barred it; and if you had fired rifle-bullets at the house all
day, not one of them could have gone through the wall.
I did not put any chimney on the house, for I knew I could not make the
roof tight enough to keep out the rain where the chimney came through.
You see I hadn’t lived in my grandmother’s shanty without learning
something. Then I didn’t fill the house all up with tin cans, for they
couldn’t be much hurt by rain; so I piled them all together outside of
the house, and put a little tent over them. I made a fireplace out-doors
under the trees, and put a sort of wooden roof over it, to keep rain
from putting the fire out.
It took nearly six weeks to build this house, and when it was done Mr.
Crusoe wanted to build a wall all around it. I asked him how long it was
since we had driven in the stakes of the fence around our first house.
He went down to the beach and looked at his almanac, and said that it
was thirteen months since we drove the first stake. According to my
calculation it was about ten weeks.
“Are they beginning to sprout yet?” asked I.
“Well, no,” replied Mr. Crusoe, “I can’t really say they are.”
“Then,” said I, “you see we haven’t found the kind of stakes that your
grandfather used, for if we had they’d have sprouted months ago.”
“That’s so,” said Mr. Crusoe, in a gloomy sort of way.
“Then we might as well give up building a fence. We’ve got a house now
that nobody can get into, and what we want to do is to cut down the
trees and bushes around the house, so that the hannibals can’t hide in
them and shoot at us,” I said.
“Cannibals, boy; not hannibals,” exclaimed Mr. Crusoe.
“All right, then,” I answered; “call them anything you choose, and I’ll
cut the trees down.”
I was surprised that he didn’t make some objection to cutting the trees
down; but that was just his way. You never could tell beforehand whether
he would be angry or pleased at anything you might propose.
However, I was very glad that I had got him out of the notion of
building a fence; and it’s my belief that his grandfather’s yarn about
fence-posts that sprouted was a regular twister. No man ever saw
fence-posts growing, I don’t care whose grandfather he was.
Mr. Crusoe helped me cut down the trees, and I will say for him that
there wasn’t a lazy bone in his whole body. One day when he was resting,
and feeling of the edge of his axe, he said,
“Mike, I told you long ago that it was all wrong for yon to be here.
When members of my family are shipwrecked they are always the only
people saved. Now I ought to have come ashore alone, and you ought to
have been drowned. You must see that.”
“I’m very sorry to incommode you, sir,” I replied, “but it’s too late
now to be sorry that I wasn’t drowned.”
“I might kill you, I suppose,” continued Mr. Crusoe. “I suppose that
would make it all right; but I don’t want to do it if I can help it.
Still, there’s the fact that I’m not following my grandfather’s example
in coming ashore alone, and living alone, and I feel uneasy about it.”
“Hadn’t we better wait till we get through this job, sir?” I asked. “You
couldn’t cut down all these trees alone very well.”
“That’s so,” said he, brightening up. “I’ll not kill you anyway until we
get this piece of ground cleared, and in the mean time we can talk it
over. I’m sure I don’t want to kill you, Mike, if we can see any way out
of it.”
This was a nice state of things. I began to think that perhaps Mr.
Crusoe’s mind might have gone adrift, and that perhaps he really would
try to kill me. But then I couldn’t really think that of him, for he had
been so good to me, and I made up my mind that he was joking. However, I
thought I’d be on the safe side, so I said,
“Mr. Crusoe, did your grandfather ever kill anybody except cannibals and
such?”
“No,” said he, “I don’t think he did, except the mutineers that came
ashore with Will Atkins.”
“Then you wouldn’t be following his example if you killed me, would
you?” I asked.
“Perhaps you’re right, Mike,” he answered; “but don’t let us talk any
more about it. I don’t think it’s a pleasant subject!”
And I’m sure I didn’t think so either.
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