“Of course, if you want to leave the island,” said Mr. Brown.
“I certainly do want to leave the island!” cried the man. “I have been here nearly a year, and I am sick and tired of the place—living all alone. That’s what made me wild, I think—no other soul on this island but me. I was shipwrecked and cast up here. I used to live in that hut,” and he pointed to the grass-and-palm-leaf shelter where the Browns had slept.
“I lived there a week,” said the man, “and then another, storm, coming after the one that wrecked my ship, tossed up on shore the deckhouse and some other things. So I took up my home in the wooden cabin.”
“It’s a nice little house,” remarked Bunny. “I like it.”
“Could we play there a little while?” Sue asked.
“As much as you like,” said the wild man who was now tame. “But were you shipwrecked?” he asked Mr. Brown.
“Oh, no,” answered the children’s father, and then he told how the Beacon had run on a sand-bar and how the boatload had come to the island and how the ship, for some strange reason, had steamed away, leaving them there.
Mr. Brown was just going to ask the stranger his name and the name of his shipwrecked vessel when over the hill Sam and Will came running. They had not caught the wild man, but they were eager to tell Mr. Brown about discovering the name Mary Bell in the wrecked deckhouse.
When the two sailors saw the “wild man” peacefully talking to their friends, Sam and Will could hardly believe their eyesight. They came to a sudden stop, their mouths open.
“Look! Look!” murmured Will. “There’s the wild man!”