“Then there was a woman in it,” I exclaimed. “Shoes don’t walk around by themselves, that ever I heard of.”
“Don’t talk rubbish,” cried Mr. Crusoe, getting angry. “There couldn’t be a woman here—at least a white woman; such a thing was never heard of. No; that shoe was worn by a cannibal, and I feel perfectly sure that the cannibals come to this island and have their horrid feasts here.”
I didn’t believe that any heathen cannibal could have a foot small enough to get into a lady’s shoe, but there was no use in saying so to Mr. Crusoe, for he had made up his mind about it, and you couldn’t argue with him. My own idea was that he had seen one of his own footprints that had been partly washed away by the rain, and had mistaken it for a woman’s; for it was all nonsense to suppose that any woman would come ashore just to make the print of her foot on the sand, and then go away again.
The next morning Mr. Crusoe had brightened up a little, and I tried to convince him that there was nothing to worry about. I told him that in the first place there never had been any woman on the island, and that in the next place, even if there had been, she couldn’t do us any harm. I never saw a woman that was dangerous yet, except my uncle Peter’s wife, and she wasn’t dangerous unless she had a poker or a rolling-pin in her hand, and there wasn’t a poker or a rolling-pin on the whole island for any woman to lay hold of.
Mr. Crusoe said that one woman wasn’t generally so very dangerous, but that if the woman was a cannibal, and had a gang of other cannibals with her, all armed with war clubs and wooden swords, and awfully hungry, we were liable to be attacked any minute, and killed and roasted. He advised me to eat lots of wild sorrel, for when cows eat wild sorrel it spoils their milk, and perhaps if we did the same thing it would give us a taste that the cannibals wouldn’t like. He didn’t seem to remember that the cannibals couldn’t find out how we tasted until after they had killed and cooked us; and then, even if they found that they couldn’t eat us, it wouldn’t be much comfort to us. I said to Mr. Crusoe that we might fill ourselves full of poison, and have the fun of seeing the cannibals drop down dead as soon as they began to eat us, but that I couldn’t see any sense in his plan of eating wild sorrel.
I felt so sure that Mr. Crusoe was mistaken about the footprint that I wanted him to come with me and have another look at it. He didn’t want to go, for he said it was an awful sight, and that when he saw it he had run as fast as he could to the house, and fastened himself in, and got his guns ready; for that was what his grandfather did when he found a footprint on the sand without any owner.
“What did your grandfather’s Friday say about the footprint?” I asked.
THE FOOTPRINT IN THE SAND.
“Say? He said nothing,” replied Mr. Crusoe. “How could he say anything when he never came to the island until months after my grandfather saw the footprint?”