While he was in bed I made myself some very decent plates and cups out of wood, but I did not mention it to Mr. Crusoe for fear that he would burn them up on the pretence that his grandfather never made any wooden dishes. I don’t believe he ever did, and I am sure he never made any clay dishes either. Crockery is white, or else it has figures painted on it with blue paint—portraits of Chinamen, and bridges, and ponds full of fish and such. How could anybody make such crockery out of nasty blue clay? Of course I didn’t tell Mr. Crusoe that his grandfather never made crockery, but I wasn’t a bit taken in by that story, and I knew when we started to make crockery out of clay that it couldn’t be done.
All this time, whether he was breaking crockery, or covering himself with clay, or lying in bed, Mr. Crusoe was worrying about the cannibals. He made me go down every morning to the beach on the other side of the island, where we had found the footprint, to see if the cannibals had landed again. I was very willing to go, for I hoped to meet a Sunday-school picnic, and get the teachers to take me and Mr. Crusoe to some civilized country with them.
Now that I had found out that Sunday-school picnics came to our island, I knew we must be very near to some civilized place, and that the land which we could see at a great distance, and that Mr. Crusoe called the main-land, and pretended that it was inhabited by cannibals and a lot of Spanish prisoners, was probably the coast of Australia or some such place where there are white people.
It would have been easy enough for us to run across to the land with the canoe, but Mr. Crusoe, of course, would not listen to it because his grandfather had never done it. According to his account the old man had built a splendid boat as big as a ship’s long-boat, and he was able to sail it anywhere, but for all that he stayed on the island and never tried to get away. I wasn’t imposed on by any such nonsense. Old Mr. Crusoe was not a sailor-man, and he couldn’t have built a decent boat if he had tried. Most likely he knocked together a raft and called it a boat.
Sometimes when I looked at Mr. Crusoe I felt almost like leaving him again, he was so aggravating; but I had given my word that I wouldn’t leave him, and then, with all his faults, he had been kind to me. Besides, the poor man was looking more like a sick man than he had ever looked before. He stayed in bed for about a week after he had broken the crockery, and when he got up, and had me help him build his goat-skin clothes around him again, he was so thin and weak that I was glad the trousers were stiff enough to hold him up in case he should have fainted away.
He lost his appetite almost entirely after he had lost his dishes, and he hardly ate enough to keep him alive. Then he couldn’t sleep at night, and after lying three or four hours in bed he would get up and wrap a blanket around him, and walk up and down the beach. One night he walked into an old goat that was troubled, like him, with want of sleep, and the goat either didn’t know him in the blanket, or else he wanted a little exercise to warm himself, and the consequence was that by the time Mr. Crusoe’s yells had waked me up he had been knocked over a good deal of the island, and would probably have been killed if I hadn’t driven the goat away with a club.
CHAPTER XII.
It was at least a month after we had seen the footprint, and Mr. Crusoe had begun to forget it, or, at any rate, to stop talking about it, when one day he went out for a walk, and came back looking as white as a new cotton maintop-sail.
“Don’t be frightened, Friday,” he said to me, almost in a whisper, “but keep cool. The cannibals have come at last.”