CHAPTER X.
There was not a sign of Mr. Crusoe visible as I came up to the beach and landed. It was time for him to have the fire lighted to cook his dinner, but there was no fire. I went up to the hut where we slept, and found him lying on his bed. He must have been glad to see me, and I know he was very much surprised, for he evidently thought I was a ghost. “Is that you, Friday?” he asked, when he opened his eyes and saw me standing by his bed. “When were you drowned?”
“I wasn’t ever drowned,” said I. “I’ve just been out for a sail; but I won’t do it again.”
“Why, of course you’re not a ghost,” said Mr. Crusoe. “There never were any ghosts on this island, or my grandfather would have seen them. And yet strange things have happened—very strange and awful things.”
“I’m sorry I went away, Mr. Crusoe,” I said to him, “and I know it was mean and cowardly; but I promise you that I’ll never do it again, and that I’ll stand by you until wecan both go together.” I was so much aggravated to think of what I had done that I talked good English, and forgot to talk like Friday.
But Mr. Crusoe didn’t forget it. If he had been dying he wouldn’t have forgotten to imitate his grandfather. “That’s all right, Friday,” he replied; “but you don’t speak as plainly as you did, which is discouraging to me after all the pains I have taken to teach you.”
I was so anxious to please him that I said, “Yes, master; me no speakee good,” which made him brighten up a little; but he soon put on a gloomy look, and turned over with his back to me.
I told him I would go and start a fire and get dinner, but he said he didn’t want anything. He wouldn’t admit that he was sick, but anybody could have seen—that is, if there had been anybody to see—that his cheeks were thinner than they were before I went away, and his eyes brighter. I supposed that he had worried himself sick about me, but I afterwards found out that he hadn’t worried at all. At least he said so one day when we were talking it over. But then I didn’t altogether believe him, for I know that if I had gone off and left myself all alone on a desert island, I should have missed myself and worried about it dreadfully.
I cooked a good dinner, and as Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t eat his share, I had to eat it to keep it from being wasted. He was always putting extra work on me. I didn’t feel so very well that afternoon, and had fallen asleep and dreamed that a big brass elephant was sitting in an arm-chair on my stomach, and saying that I must get up and eat a barrel of dry Indian meal, or he would report me to the captain, when Mr. Crusoe woke me up by shaking me, and then put his hand over my mouth as a hint for me to keep quiet.
“I am going to tell you something,” he said, “that will probably turn your hair gray. It has turned mine perfectly white”—which wasn’t true, for his hair was the same color it had always been. “Friday,” he continued, “there is somebody on the island.”
“Of course there is,” said I. “There’s you and me, and the goats and the rest of the animals.”
“There is some one else,” Mr. Crusoe replied, looking more solemn than ever. “Friday, yesterday I saw a footstep on the beach.”
“Likely enough,” I said; “you and I walk on the beach every day, and of course we leave footprints.”
“Friday,” he answered, “this was on the beach on the other side of the island, where we never go.”
“I was there,” said I, “the day before I went out sailing.”
“Friday,” he continued, shaking his finger at me, “is your foot small?”
“Well, not so very; I can wear No. 10 shoes, though.”
“Are your shoes narrow, with a little heel in the middle of each one?”
“Not much,” said I; “but then what’s the use of talking about shoes when I haven’t worn any since I’ve been here.”
“Then, you see,” said Mr. Crusoe, “that you couldn’t have made the print of a shoe on the beach.”
“But you might have made it,” I answered; “you wear shoes.”
“Friday, now steady yourself and don’t be frightened. Be calm, like me. That footprint, Friday, was made by a woman’s shoe.”
“Then there was a woman in it,” I exclaimed. “Shoes don’t walk around by themselves, that ever I heard of.”
“Don’t talk rubbish,” cried Mr. Crusoe, getting angry. “There couldn’t be a woman here—at least a white woman; such a thing was never heard of. No; that shoe was worn by a cannibal, and I feel perfectly sure that the cannibals come to this island and have their horrid feasts here.”
I didn’t believe that any heathen cannibal could have a foot small enough to get into a lady’s shoe, but there was no use in saying so to Mr. Crusoe, for he had made up his mind about it, and you couldn’t argue with him. My own idea was that he had seen one of his own footprints that had been partly washed away by the rain, and had mistaken it for a woman’s; for it was all nonsense to suppose that any woman would come ashore just to make the print of her foot on the sand, and then go away again.
The next morning Mr. Crusoe had brightened up a little, and I tried to convince him that there was nothing to worry about. I told him that in the first place there never had been any woman on the island, and that in the next place, even if there had been, she couldn’t do us any harm. I never saw a woman that was dangerous yet, except my uncle Peter’s wife, and she wasn’t dangerous unless she had a poker or a rolling-pin in her hand, and there wasn’t a poker or a rolling-pin on the whole island for any woman to lay hold of.
Mr. Crusoe said that one woman wasn’t generally so very dangerous, but that if the woman was a cannibal, and had a gang of other cannibals with her, all armed with war clubs and wooden swords, and awfully hungry, we were liable to be attacked any minute, and killed and roasted. He advisedme to eat lots of wild sorrel, for when cows eat wild sorrel it spoils their milk, and perhaps if we did the same thing it would give us a taste that the cannibals wouldn’t like. He didn’t seem to remember that the cannibals couldn’t find out how we tasted until after they had killed and cooked us; and then, even if they found that they couldn’t eat us, it wouldn’t be much comfort to us. I said to Mr. Crusoe that we might fill ourselves full of poison, and have the fun of seeing the cannibals drop down dead as soon as they began to eat us, but that I couldn’t see any sense in his plan of eating wild sorrel.
I felt so sure that Mr. Crusoe was mistaken about the footprint that I wanted him to come with me and have another look at it. He didn’t want to go, for he said it was an awful sight, and that when he saw it he had run as fast as he could to the house, and fastened himself in, and got his guns ready; for that was what his grandfather did when he found a footprint on the sand without any owner.
“What did your grandfather’s Friday say about the footprint?” I asked.
THE FOOTPRINT IN THE SAND.
THE FOOTPRINT IN THE SAND.
THE FOOTPRINT IN THE SAND.
“Say? He said nothing,” replied Mr. Crusoe. “How could he say anything when he never came to the island until months after my grandfather saw the footprint?”
“Then how did it happen that you didn’t see the footprint before you made a Friday of me? There is something wrong about that.”
I only said this just to aggravate Mr. Crusoe a little, but I was sorry afterwards, for it made him miserable. You see he couldn’t find any way out of it, and he felt that he hadn’t done precisely as his grandfather did, and so he wrung his hands and said he was a miserable sinner.
After coaxing him a long while I got him to agree to come with me and look at the footprint; but first he made me hunt up my goat-skin clothes and get into them. They felt more uncomfortable than ever, for I had been enjoying a blue flannel shirt and real Christian trousers while I was away in the canoe, and I could hardly walk when I got into the goat-skins. I have always thought that making me wear goat-skins was the meanest thing Mr. Crusoe did all the time I was with him; but then I suppose the poor man thought he was doing right.
When we came to the beach I saw the footprint. There couldn’t be any doubt about it. The footprint was made by a lady’s shoe, and she must have been one of the very finest of ladies, for her shoe had such a heel that she couldn’t possibly have walked half a mile without being lame.
“There,” said Mr. Crusoe, “will you now dare to say that I made that footprint?”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t believe you did; and what’s more, I never knew you to have hair-pins in your hair, either.”
“What do you mean?” asked he.
“I mean that this thing that I have just picked up is a hair-pin, and it must have been dropped by the woman who made the footprint.”
Mr. Crusoe looked at the hair-pin and shook all over.
“We are done for now!” he exclaimed.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“Why, that the cannibals have been here. Don’t you know how they wear their hair? Didn’t you ever see pictures of them with their hair twisted into a knot on the top of their heads? They couldn’t make their hair stay up without hair-pins, and that hair-pin that you have found belonged to a cannibal. We shall be killed and eaten before we are a month older.”
“But your grandfather wasn’t killed, was he?” I asked.
“That’s so; he wasn’t,” replied Mr. Crusoe. “Perhaps we can kill the cannibals, just as he did.”
I encouraged him to believe that we were a match for allthe cannibals in the Pacific, and so I got him cheered up enough to be willing to walk along the beach with me, and see if we could find anything beside the hair-pin and the footprint.
Just around a little rocky point we found another bit of beach, and a place where there had been a fire. All around the place there were scattered empty tin cans and pieces of broken china. I picked up some of the cans and showed them to Mr. Crusoe. One was labelled “Boston Baked Beans,” and another “Fresh Peaches,” and another “Oxtail Soup.”
Mr. Crusoe looked as if he was going to faint away. “Now,” he said, “perhaps you will believe that the cannibals have been here. This is the very spot where they held their horrible feasts. The sight of that loathsome can of baked beans turns my stomach. If the wretches come here again we must kill every one of them. It will be a noble deed. We must let no guilty man escape.”
“But, Mr. Crusoe,” said I, “it isn’t wrong to eat baked beans, that ever I heard of. A man who eats baked beans isn’t a cannibal, for I was shipmates once with a chap from Boston, and he told me that nobody in Boston ever had anything to eat except baked beans. And I know the Bostonpeople are not cannibals, for the M’Intyres used to live there, and they are as decent people as ever lived.”
“Can’t a Frenchman or a Spaniard eat baked beans?” asked Mr. Crusoe. “And when they do eat baked beans, is that any proof that they are not Frenchmen or Spaniards?”
“Well, I don’t suppose it is.”
“These cannibals,” continued Mr. Crusoe, “naturally like a few vegetables with their meat. They probably captured a Boston whaler, and stole the peaches and baked beans from her, and brought them here and ate them with the crew—I mean at the same time that they ate the crew. They were the very worst kind of cannibals. It’s bad enough for a man to be a cannibal and to eat his fellow-man, but when he deliberately washes him down with baked beans and fresh peaches it shows a cold-blooded deliberation that is unspeakably revolting. Never let me hear you trying to defend cannibals again, or I shall think that you have not yet got over your hankering after forbidden meat. I recollect that it was some time before my grandfather could get his man Friday to see the wickedness of cannibalism.”
It was no use to say anything more to Mr. Crusoe, for he was so prejudiced that nobody could argue with him. He made me go back to the house for a shovel, and then heinsisted that I should bury all the cans and the other relics of the “horrid orgies,” as he called them, in the sand.
Now I knew well enough what had really happened. The footprint, the hair-pin, the empty cans, and the ashes meant that there had been a picnic; and as there was no sign of lemon-peel, it had probably been a Sunday-school picnic, with lots of Sunday-school picnic lemonade. Any boy with sense enough to put a dog and a string and a tin can together would have known what had happened. But Mr. Crusoe had got the idea of cannibals into his head, and you couldn’t have hoisted it out with a steam winch. All the way home he groaned and talked about the awful wickedness of the cannibals, and of the great danger we were in. “We shall be roasted and eaten with baked beans,” he kept saying. “Think of it, Friday, my poor follower—with baked beans!”
I told him that I would just as soon be eaten with baked beans as without them; but he only said that I was a poor, ignorant savage, and that I didn’t even know enough to know that I wouldn’t agree with the cannibals, and that they would probably have the cholera after eating me.
When we got back to the house his courage came back a little, and he was full of the idea of killing all the cannibalsthe next time they landed on the island. He wanted to make some dynamite, but he couldn’t find the materials in the medicine-chest. So he ordered me to load all the guns, and be ready to hide behind the bushes, and fire on the cannibals while they were eating their dinner.
I knew he was just capable of shooting down a whole Sunday-school, superintendent and all, under the pretence that they were cannibals; but I wasn’t going to help him in any such nonsense, so I loaded all the guns with nothing but powder—except the Remington rifles, which were loaded with copper cartridges. I never went to Sunday-school myself, but I think Sunday-schools are good things, and I don’t believe in shooting them.