“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“Why, that the cannibals have been here. Don’t you know how they wear their hair? Didn’t you ever see pictures of them with their hair twisted into a knot on the top of their heads? They couldn’t make their hair stay up without hair-pins, and that hair-pin that you have found belonged to a cannibal. We shall be killed and eaten before we are a month older.”
“But your grandfather wasn’t killed, was he?” I asked.
“That’s so; he wasn’t,” replied Mr. Crusoe. “Perhaps we can kill the cannibals, just as he did.”
I encouraged him to believe that we were a match for all the cannibals in the Pacific, and so I got him cheered up enough to be willing to walk along the beach with me, and see if we could find anything beside the hair-pin and the footprint.
Just around a little rocky point we found another bit of beach, and a place where there had been a fire. All around the place there were scattered empty tin cans and pieces of broken china. I picked up some of the cans and showed them to Mr. Crusoe. One was labelled “Boston Baked Beans,” and another “Fresh Peaches,” and another “Oxtail Soup.”
Mr. Crusoe looked as if he was going to faint away. “Now,” he said, “perhaps you will believe that the cannibals have been here. This is the very spot where they held their horrible feasts. The sight of that loathsome can of baked beans turns my stomach. If the wretches come here again we must kill every one of them. It will be a noble deed. We must let no guilty man escape.”
“But, Mr. Crusoe,” said I, “it isn’t wrong to eat baked beans, that ever I heard of. A man who eats baked beans isn’t a cannibal, for I was shipmates once with a chap from Boston, and he told me that nobody in Boston ever had anything to eat except baked beans. And I know the Boston people are not cannibals, for the M’Intyres used to live there, and they are as decent people as ever lived.”
“Can’t a Frenchman or a Spaniard eat baked beans?” asked Mr. Crusoe. “And when they do eat baked beans, is that any proof that they are not Frenchmen or Spaniards?”
“Well, I don’t suppose it is.”