“These cannibals,” continued Mr. Crusoe, “naturally like a few vegetables with their meat. They probably captured a Boston whaler, and stole the peaches and baked beans from her, and brought them here and ate them with the crew—I mean at the same time that they ate the crew. They were the very worst kind of cannibals. It’s bad enough for a man to be a cannibal and to eat his fellow-man, but when he deliberately washes him down with baked beans and fresh peaches it shows a cold-blooded deliberation that is unspeakably revolting. Never let me hear you trying to defend cannibals again, or I shall think that you have not yet got over your hankering after forbidden meat. I recollect that it was some time before my grandfather could get his man Friday to see the wickedness of cannibalism.”
It was no use to say anything more to Mr. Crusoe, for he was so prejudiced that nobody could argue with him. He made me go back to the house for a shovel, and then he insisted that I should bury all the cans and the other relics of the “horrid orgies,” as he called them, in the sand.
Now I knew well enough what had really happened. The footprint, the hair-pin, the empty cans, and the ashes meant that there had been a picnic; and as there was no sign of lemon-peel, it had probably been a Sunday-school picnic, with lots of Sunday-school picnic lemonade. Any boy with sense enough to put a dog and a string and a tin can together would have known what had happened. But Mr. Crusoe had got the idea of cannibals into his head, and you couldn’t have hoisted it out with a steam winch. All the way home he groaned and talked about the awful wickedness of the cannibals, and of the great danger we were in. “We shall be roasted and eaten with baked beans,” he kept saying. “Think of it, Friday, my poor follower—with baked beans!”
I told him that I would just as soon be eaten with baked beans as without them; but he only said that I was a poor, ignorant savage, and that I didn’t even know enough to know that I wouldn’t agree with the cannibals, and that they would probably have the cholera after eating me.
When we got back to the house his courage came back a little, and he was full of the idea of killing all the cannibals the next time they landed on the island. He wanted to make some dynamite, but he couldn’t find the materials in the medicine-chest. So he ordered me to load all the guns, and be ready to hide behind the bushes, and fire on the cannibals while they were eating their dinner.
I knew he was just capable of shooting down a whole Sunday-school, superintendent and all, under the pretence that they were cannibals; but I wasn’t going to help him in any such nonsense, so I loaded all the guns with nothing but powder—except the Remington rifles, which were loaded with copper cartridges. I never went to Sunday-school myself, but I think Sunday-schools are good things, and I don’t believe in shooting them.
CHAPTER XI.
One morning not long after we had found the footprint, I woke up smelling smoke. The house was full of smoke that blew in through the door, and I thought that the woods must be on fire. I jumped up, and after feeling in Mr. Crusoe’s bunk to see if he was there, and finding that he was not, I rushed out to get a breath of air.
Mr. Crusoe was standing close to a big bonfire, and stirring it up with a long pole to make it blaze. The bonfire was made of clothes, and my best flannel shirt and trousers were blazing on the top of it. A little ways off was a pile of broken glass and crockery, so big that I should never have thought that we had crockery enough to make such a pile.