It was at least a month after we had seen the footprint, and Mr. Crusoe
had begun to forget it, or, at any rate, to stop talking about it, when
one day he went out for a walk, and came back looking as white as a new
cotton maintop-sail.
“Don’t be frightened, Friday,” he said to me, almost in a whisper, “but
keep cool. The cannibals have come at last.”
“Where are they?” said I.
“Just where they always land—on the beach, where they held their horrid
orgies the last time they were here.”
“Are there many of them?” I asked.
“There’s a whole big canoe full—at least twenty-five or thirty, and
they’ve kindled a fire and are getting ready for their revolting feast.”
“Do they look hungry?”
“Very hungry indeed,” replied Mr. Crusoe. “The men are, most all of
them, tall and thin, as if they hadn’t been fed for a week.”
“Are they armed?”
“Of course they are. Did you ever know cannibals to go on an excursion
without their arms? They have clubs and wooden swords, and bows and
arrows—and most likely the arrows are poisoned. We must fight and kill
them, or they will kill us.”
Now I didn’t believe that the people who had landed on the island were
cannibals, but it didn’t do to tell Mr. Crusoe so. He was very much
excited, and his eyes were wilder than I had ever seen them before. I
was very much afraid that he would try to fight the people before I
could make him understand the difference between cannibals and a
Sunday-school picnic. There’s a great deal of difference between them,
for the picnic has, as a general rule, nothing but cold victuals and
lemonade.
Mr. Crusoe made me collect all the guns together, and he examined them
to see if they were loaded. All but the breech-loading rifles were
loaded with powder only, for I had loaded them when he first told me
about the footprint, and I had been very careful not to put any bullets
or shot in them. But the breech-loaders and the pistols were made for
copper cartridges, and I couldn’t prevent Mr. Crusoe from loading these
himself.
Then Mr. Crusoe buckled two sword-bayonets around his waist, and put two
big knives and eight revolvers in his belt. He made me carry the same
load, besides a bag slung over one shoulder and filled with ammunition.
Each of us carried four guns on each shoulder, and with this nice little
load we started for the beach, where the cannibals were getting ready
for dinner.
Anybody who has ever tried to carry a lot of oars on his shoulder
without first lashing them together, knows how they will separate and
spread out like a fan. Mr. Crusoe’s guns did the same thing. The two
that were nearest to his head kept swinging up against his ears, and
banging pretty hard against his head, and the others spread out so that
he could not hold them. This worried him so much that he got angry, and
threw the whole lot down on the ground. One of the guns went off, and a
bullet hit Mr. Crusoe in the calf of the leg. He was more frightened
than hurt, and after I had tied his leg up he found that he could limp
without hurting himself very much. I had lashed my guns together, so
that I could carry them easily enough, and I passed a lashing around his
so that he could put them all on one shoulder. They were awfully heavy,
but he staggered along until we got where we could see the cannibals
through the bushes without their seeing us.
There were about twenty men and eight or nine women on the beach, and a
nice little cutter yacht was lying at anchor near the shore. The people
were all white, except two negro servants, and we were near enough to
hear them talk, and know that they were English. They had started a big
fire, and while two of them were cooking, the rest were standing about
and talking.
Mr. Crusoe was terribly excited. He called the visitors “cannibals of
the deepest dye,” and said that there were three or four prisoners on
the yacht who would be brought ashore and killed as soon as the fire was
ready. He laid all the guns side by side, and told me that as soon as we
had fired them all we would rush out with our pistols and kill all the
cannibals that might be left alive.
“I will shoot at the men on the right-hand side of the fire,” said Mr.
Crusoe, “and you, Friday, will shoot at those on the left. We must be
sure and kill every man we aim at, and we must treat the women just like
the men, for they are just as strong and blood-thirsty. We’ll wait till
they get pretty close together, and then we’ll begin.”
[Illustration:
“HE CALLED THE VISITORS ‘CANNIBALS OF THE DEEPEST DYE.’”
]
I was dreadfully afraid that he would really shoot and kill somebody,
and then that the rest of the picnickers would kill him before I could
explain. I thought I would try once more to make him listen to reason
before seizing him and taking his gun away from him. So I said, “Mr.
Crusoe, we are perfectly certain to be killed and eaten if we fire at
the cannibals now.”
“Why so?” he asked.
“Because,” I said, “now that I remember it, I forgot to put any bullets
in the guns, and we have nothing to defend ourselves with except the two
Remington rifles and the pistols.”
He looked awfully angry, and said that he believed that I had done it on
purpose, and that I still had a hankering for human flesh, and wanted to
join the cannibals. But I didn’t pay any attention to what he said, and
told him that we ought to go back to the house and finish loading our
guns.
This struck him as being a sensible idea; but he said that we would
leave all the guns except the two rifles among the trees, and would go
back and fetch the bullets, and load them where we were. I agreed to
hide the guns where the cannibals couldn’t find them, and I did it by
dropping them into a pool of water, and then we started to go back to
the house.
By the time we reached the house Mr. Crusoe’s leg was hurting him so
badly that he could hardly manage to walk, and I began to hope that he
would give up the idea of going back to fight the cannibals; but no
sooner had we got inside the house, and put up the bars against the
door, so as to prevent the cannibals from coming in, than Mr. Crusoe
picked up a bit of rope and jumped on me. He wasn’t a strong man
naturally, but he had suddenly got so strong that I couldn’t do anything
with him without hurting him, and that I was resolved not to do. In
about a minute he had me tied hand and foot, and then he filled his
pockets with bullets and got ready to go and fight all by himself.
Now Mr. Crusoe was a landsman, and of course he couldn’t make a knot
that was worth anything. I lay perfectly still, to see what he was going
to do, but I believed all the time that I could easily get my hands
free.
Presently Mr. Crusoe came and stood over me with one of his pistols in
his hand. He said that he thought he ought to kill me to keep me from
joining the cannibals, but on the whole he had decided to let me live
until after he had either driven the cannibals away or had been killed
himself. He was very sorry, so he said, to find that I could not be
trusted, but he supposed that I had been a cannibal so long that I
really could not get over my depraved taste. Then he shouldered both of
the rifles and started for the beach.
As soon as he was gone I tried to get my hands loose, but found that I
couldn’t do it. Some way or other Mr. Crusoe had contrived to tie a knot
that wouldn’t slip. After getting my wrists sore by trying to pull them
out of the lashing, I resolved to roll over and over till I could reach
the place where we had built the fire for breakfast, and see if I could
find a live coal, and set the lashing on fire with it. But I remembered
that I had eight revolvers in my belt, and I didn’t dare to roll on them
for fear they would go off.
Then I thought that if I could turn over on my face, and manage to get
up on my knees, I could shuffle over to the fireplace. I rolled over
gently, though the revolvers cut into my side a good deal, and then
scrambled on to my knees; but as soon as I tried to move away from the
place where Mr. Crusoe had left me, I found that he had made the end of
the rope that was around my ankles fast to one of the timbers of the
house, and I couldn’t possibly get at it to unfasten it.
I tried in every way I could think of to get loose, but I couldn’t do
it. My hands were tied together so closely that I couldn’t use them to
loosen the rope around my feet; and I could not get out my knife, for it
was on my left side out of reach. After twisting myself into all sorts
of knots, and wearing all the skin off of my wrists and ankles, I
finally gave it up, and lay down on my back to rest.
I waited a long while to hear the sound of Mr. Crusoe’s rifle, but as I
didn’t hear it, I made up my mind that he had given up the idea of
fighting, or that perhaps the visitors had caught him, and convinced him
that they were not cannibals. But if they had done that they certainly
would have come up to the house to find me; so I waited, expecting every
minute to see them come in the door.
You may not believe it, but I actually fell asleep while I was lying
there on the floor, and when I woke up the sun was shining straight in
the door, as it always did just before sunset. I forgot about being
tied, and tried to jump up in a hurry, but I remembered what was the
matter when the rope tripped me up, and I fell with my head against the
side of the house.
I was so tired of being a prisoner that I was a little reckless, and I
managed to pull a pistol out of my belt and began firing at the rope
that tied my feet to the timbers of the house. I fired five times, and
then, by great good-luck, I happened to hit the rope, and to cut it so
nearly in two that I was able to break it.
I could now roll all around the house if I wanted to, but my hands and
feet were still tied fast together. The fire was out by this time, I was
very sure, but I knew where there was a box of matches stuck between two
planks, about a foot above the floor, and I rolled over towards them,
taking the chances that the pistols would go off. The pistols hurt me a
good deal as I rolled over on them, but I reached the match-box at last,
and found it empty.
Then I was discouraged, for I felt sure that something had happened to
Mr. Crusoe, and there I was, a prisoner, and unable to help him. I had
tried every way I could think of to get rid of the ropes, but had
failed, and besides I was very tired, and my wrists were very raw.
I thought the fire must be out, but still I resolved to get over to it
and see if I could find a live coal. I rolled over about twenty times
before I reached the place where we always made the fire, and you ought
to have seen the black-and-blue places that the pistols made all around
my waist.
I stirred up the ashes for a while, and couldn’t find a live coal till,
all of a sudden, I found the hair on the outside of my goat-skin
trousers was on fire. I had rolled directly on to a piece of wood that
was still burning, and for once I was glad that I had on goat-skin
trousers that couldn’t burn, instead of cotton or linen trousers that
would have blazed up and roasted me.
It did not take me very long to find the live coal and to press the rope
that was around my hands close against it, and in the course of ten
minutes or so the rope was burned through, and my hands were loose. Then
I got out my knife, and cut away the rope that held my feet, and I was
free again. I had a few little burns on my hands, but I have often
wondered since then how it happened that some one of the pistols didn’t
happen to get heated against a hot coal and go off, and shoot three or
four bullets through me.
It was now just about sunset, and in the latitude where we were it used
to grow dark almost as soon as the sun went down. I started on a run
towards the beach to find Mr. Crusoe, and presently I found him lying as
if he was dead on the ground.
He had plainly fallen down, for his rifles were scattered all around
just where he had dropped them. He was just as if he was dead, and his
face was as white as a sheet. He was warm, however, and I did not think
he was dead; so I ran back to the house and got some brandy, and poured
a little of it—not more than half a tumblerful—down his throat. This
revived him, and he opened his eyes and managed to say that he rather
thought he had been a little faint.
Seeing that he was alive, I left him for a few minutes while I hurried
down to the beach to see if the picnickers were there, intending to ask
them to come and help me; but they had been gone a long time, for their
boat was out of sight. So I went back to Mr. Crusoe, and asked him if he
thought he could walk to the house.
He said he thought he could, but that he would like to have me look at
his leg first, for he believed it had been bleeding again. I took out my
knife and contrived, after a lot of hard work, to cut a piece out of his
trousers just where the bullet had entered, and I found that the poor
man had bled nearly to death. This time I tied up his leg so tight that
it couldn’t bleed any more, and then I picked Mr. Crusoe up and carried
him home. He weighed very little, but he kept telling me that I was not
strong enough to carry him, and that I must let him walk or I would
burst a blood-vessel.
I laid him on his bed and prized his goat-skin clothes off, and covered
him up with blankets, for luckily he had had sense enough not to burn up
our bedclothes. Then I cooked him a good hot supper, and before very
long he was asleep. But he kept moaning and tossing in his sleep, and I
could tell by the feeling of his hands that he had a fever. So I sat by
the side of him all night, which was easy enough, since I must have
slept two or three hours that afternoon.
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