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.”