The last thing I did after we had knocked off work on the wreck was to cut a top-gallant sail adrift from the wreckage that I had towed ashore. We made a sort of tent of this, and Mr. Crusoe slept under it without saying a word. He had had enough of sleeping in trees, and I suppose that, if the truth was known, one night of that kind of lodging was all that his grandfather ever wanted.
As the weather looked settled, we agreed to take the next day for building a house instead of going to the wreck. Mr. Crusoe went to the hill on the north end of the island, and found the place where his grandfather used to live. It was a little level spot at the foot of the hill, where the rock rose up straight for about twenty feet.
“We’ll pitch a tent right against the rock,” said he, “and we’ll surround it with a fence made by driving stakes into the ground close together, and then we’ll dig a cave in the rock so as to have a cellar.”
“What do you want to live right up against a damp rock for?” I asked.
“So that when the cannibals come to attack us, nobody can get at us from the back of our castle,” he replied.
“They can’t get up on the hill and drop rocks down on us, and jump down right into the middle of our house, I suppose?” said I. “What’s the good of a fence and all that, when you put your house where anybody can jump down on to the roof of it?”
“Do you pretend to know more than my grandfather?” asked Mr. Crusoe, looking very fierce.
Of course I had to say I didn’t; and it was true too. I didn’t pretend to know more than the old man, for I knew I knew more. Why, a boy who had never been at sea more than two months would have been ashamed to choose such a place for a house.
“I wonder your grandfather didn’t build his house on the top of the hill,” I said, after a while. “Of course he had some good reason; but if he had done it he could have watched for ships, and could have defended himself against the cannibals—whoever they are.”
But Mr. Crusoe looked so furious that I gave up saying anything more about the place for the house, and we went to work and pitched the tent.