A new Robinson Crusoe

by W. L. Alden

It was a very nice trap, I suppose, but it never caught anything but Mr. Crusoe. We used to go to it to look for goats every night and morning for about a week, but no goat was ever stupid enough to walk into it. The last time, however, that we went to it Mr. Crusoe went too near the edge, and it caved in with him. He never could have got out of the trap alone, but as I was there I pulled him out without much trouble.

I said to him that if he would leave it to me I would catch as many goats as he wanted, and he said I could do what I liked, but that he didn’t want anything more to do with pitfalls.

I took half a dozen old tomato-cans that we had emptied, and dropped them in a sort of careless way where I knew the goats would find them, and then hid behind a tree. Pretty soon the goats came along on their way to the creek to get a drink, and as soon as they saw the tomato-cans they went at them as if they were starving, and I had no trouble in walking right up to them, and making a line fast around the necks of an old goat and her three kids. You see I knew, from living in my grandmother’s shanty, that there is nothing that goats are so fond of as they are of tomato-cans, and so I felt sure that by using tomato-cans as ground-bait I could catch goats as easy as anything.

It struck me as a very curious thing that when I started for home, leading the three kids and the goat, all the rest of the flock came after me, and didn’t seem to be in the least bit afraid. They followed me all the way to the house, and when Mr. Crusoe came out they crowded around him, and you would have thought he was their dearest friend instead of being a complete stranger.

Mr. Crusoe, of course, had an explanation ready. He said that we must have been very stupid not to remember that his grandfather tamed all the goats on the island, and that instead of being wild goats these were some of those that belonged to his grandfather. He said that what proved this was that the goats were so friendly with him, and that they evidently mistook him for his grandfather. He was as pleased as he could be about it, and fed the goats with all the rubbish that was lying around the house. When I found out that the goats were tame, I let those loose that I had caught, and the flock went and lay down in the shade of the house, as if they meant to live with us for the next twenty-eight years.

When they were hungry or thirsty they would wander away, but they always came back again; and all the rest of the time that we were on the island those goats fairly lived with us, and you couldn’t get up in the night without falling over them.

I could not think what Mr. Crusoe wanted to do with the goat-skins; but when they were dry he went to work to make clothes out of them. He made himself a pair of breeches that came down to his knees, a jacket without any sleeves, and a tremendous big cap that ran up to a point about two feet above the top of his head, and had a big flap on the back of it which hung down over the back of his neck. It was the ugliest and stiffest and heaviest suit of clothes that was ever made, and when Mr. Crusoe had it tried on, and found that the breeches were too small and the coat too big, he said he would give it to me.

However, he didn’t give it to me until about a week later, and by that time he had a new suit made for himself. The morning after he had finished it he woke me up to build the fire, and for about a minute he frightened me nearly out of my mind; for he had on all his goat-skin clothes, and looked worse than any heathen that ever was born. I couldn’t just at first think who he was, and I really thought that the cannibals he was always talking about had boarded us and were going to eat us.

Mr. Crusoe handed me what he called my suit of goat-skin clothes, and told me to put them on. I tried to argue with him, but it wasn’t of any use, especially as he had taken my regular clothes and locked them up or hid them somewhere. He told me that we had been on the island nearly three years, and our clothes were all worn out, so we must either wear goat-skin clothes or no clothes at all; that his grandfather wore goat-skin clothes of the same pattern as those he wanted me to wear; and, finally, that he’d give me just ten minutes to get into the goat-skins, and that if I didn’t choose to do it he would see that there would be a nice coffin for me to wear.

It didn’t take me over five minutes to put on the goat-skin clothes after I saw that Mr. Crusoe was in dead earnest. I could have made a pair of breeches out of stove-pipe that would have been easy and comfortable by the side of those that Mr. Crusoe gave me; and as for the cap, it was heavier than a flour-barrel, and nothing like as soft. What made me so disgusted was that both Mr. Crusoe and I had lots of decent Christian clothes that would have lasted us for three or four years, but he was that aggravating that he wouldn’t wear them, and wouldn’t let me wear them.