CHAPTER IV.
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 everlived. 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 betweenthe 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 theH. 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 noidea 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 thatperhaps 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.