A new Robinson Crusoe

by W. L. Alden

Then we cut a lot of stakes, and drove them in the ground about two inches apart, and Mr. Crusoe said they would grow and make a solid wall, which I didn’t believe. The fence was to be about fifty feet long, and it took us nearly all day to cut and drive stakes enough to make a piece of fence six feet long, so I saw we were going to have plenty of work.

We moved all the things into what was to be our front yard, and piled them up so as to make a wall. Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t leave any open place in this wall for an entrance, but he knocked together a sort of ladder, and said we could climb over the wall with it, and then pull it over after us. He tried it when he had got it finished, but it broke just as he got to the top of it, and as he fell he knocked down most of the upper part of the wall, which was made of tin cans, and I had fairly to dig him out from under them. Then he decided that we needn’t use a ladder until we had finished our regular fence, and that we might leave an opening in our wall of barrels and cans. He sometimes showed a little sense, especially after he had hurt himself.

You should have seen, though, what a rage he got into when I went up on the hill behind the tent and jumped down into the yard. He told me that if I ever did it again he should have to make an example of me, and said that no matter what it might cost, he would do his duty to his grandfather. Then all of a sudden he got over being angry, and took me by both hands, and said he loved me, and begged me with tears in his eyes to do as he wanted me to do. I promised that I would; for, aggravating as he was, he was good to me, and I was always anxious to please him.

For the next two weeks I went to the wreck two or three times every day, and brought ashore no end of things, while Mr. Crusoe worked part of the time at his fence, and part of the time at making a cave. The rock was soft and crumbling, and Mr. Crusoe worked his way into it with a crow-bar at a pretty good rate; but one day, after the cave was about six feet deep, part of the roof fell in on him, and buried him all but his head, so deep that he could not move. By good-luck this happened early in the morning, and I had plenty of time to dig him out. I got him out after working till long after noon, but all the time I expected the rock would cave in again and bury us both. After it was all over, Mr. Crusoe said that the cave was large enough for the present, and that he would not work any more on it until more important things were attended to, and in fact he let it alone for good and all.

We got the fence done at last, and made a good stout ladder so as to climb over it safely. But Mr. Crusoe would have the tops of the stakes cut to a sharp point, and as he was only a landsman, and couldn’t climb well, he was continually getting caught on the points; and once, when I came back from the wreck, I found him hanging with his head down, with his trousers caught on a sharp stake, and he said he had been hanging for two hours. After this he sawed off the points at the place where we climbed over the fence, and was able to keep himself right side up.

He wanted me to cut the ship’s cables into short lengths, and pile them up inside of the fence so as to strengthen it; but I explained to him that I couldn’t cut up chain-cables, and that even if I could, the lengths would be too heavy to bring ashore. His grandfather might have cut up the cables belonging to his own ship because they were made of hemp, but I told Mr. Crusoe that ships never carried hemp cables nowadays. He said it was an outrage, and he would make the owners smart for it, but all the same he had to give up his idea of strengthening the fence with cables. However, he dug up a great deal of earth in the front yard and piled it against the fence, and so made a beautiful hole for water to collect in whenever it should rain.

We had made loop-holes in the fence to shoot through, and nothing would satisfy Mr. Crusoe but to mount the rifles on gun-carriages like cannons, and have them always loaded and pointed out of the loop-holes. I knew well enough that he must have got this idea from his grandfather, and it was as ridiculous as most of that foolish old man’s ideas. In the first place, while the rifles were mounted, you could never hit anybody with them, unless somebody happened to be directly in front of them; and, in the second place, they were certain to be ruined by rust. But I let Mr. Crusoe have his own way with all but two rifles, and those, I told him, we must keep to carry with us when we went outside of the fence. He made the most rickety gun-carriages you ever saw, and if he had fired his rifles only once they would have kicked the carriages all to pieces. However, he was very proud of his work, and said that now the place began to look as it must have looked when his grandfather was there. That very night he thought he heard a noise, and got up and fell over one gun-carriage, and knocked it over against the next one, and that one fell against another, so that the whole of them came down, and one rifle went off of its own accord, and there was “daybreak to westward” for a few minutes, as Nigger Jim, who was one of the H. G. Thompson’s crew, was always saying when something extraordinary happened. The next day he said that he wouldn’t take the time just then to repair the gun-carriages, and that I might put the rifles in the tent. I told him that I supposed that rifles were not invented in his grandfather’s time, and he brightened up and said “that was so,” and that as we did not have any muskets like those that his grandfather had, he did not think that it was absolutely necessary for us to mount the rifles.

One day Mr. Crusoe took a piece of board, and cut on it in large letters, “I came on shore here on the 18th of September, 1884,” and nailed it to a big post, and set it up in a hole that he dug for it on the beach. In the side of the post he cut a notch every day, and a deeper one every Sunday. This, he said, would be our almanac; though what is the use of an almanac that does not give you the sun’s declination, and Greenwich time, and other things that I know you’ve got to get out of the almanac when you go to work up your observations, I can’t see.

The curious thing about Mr. Crusoe’s almanac was the way in which it made the time fly. Whenever Mr. Crusoe hadn’t anything else to do, he would go and cut two or three weeks of notches on his post. After we had been on the island only twenty-three days, according to my reckoning, the post showed that we had been there nearly three months, and Mr. Crusoe wouldn’t hear a word against it, but always insisted that his almanac was right. He would say one day, “Mike, we have now been here ten weeks, and I think we are getting on very slowly with our house” and the very next day he would say, “We have been here now thirteen weeks and four days, and our provisions are holding out very well.” I tried at first to remember the real dates, but Mr. Crusoe got me so confused that I had to give it up.

We had been ashore, I should think, about six weeks, and had pretty well stripped the ship of everything that was useful, when Mr. Crusoe proposed that we should begin to saw the ship into pieces and bring them ashore. I told him that the first heavy blow from the southward would bring on a sea that would break her up fast enough, but he would not be satisfied unless I would saw through every timber and stanchion and deck-beam. I had to begin it, just to satisfy him, though I knew it was all foolishness, but by good-luck it turned out that I only had to work at the job one day.