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"Hullo," said Popplethorne, one of the other middies, looking up from the plate on which he was busily engaged; while several other fellows, similarly employed ceased operations likewise, staring at Tommy in astonishment. "What's up?" "Nothing's up, but everything seems down," replied my little chum in an aggrieved tone.
"Funny, wasn't it?" said Dick Popplethorne to me as the two turned away, laughing again, only more quietly now. "What a rum start for him to sing out, `dead boy!" I thought so, too afterwards.
He expressed a wish to seek the seclusion of his own cabin, whereat I was not surprised, both Dick Popplethorne and myself having observed his face assume a greenish-yellowy-liver sort of look during the last few moments of "Joe's" narrative; but he kept up his courage to the last, murmuring yet more faintly as he tottered below. "Ve-wy good ah! Ye-es, ve-wy good ah, indeed!"
"He, he, he!" cackled Mr Smythe again, while Dick Popplethorne, who had joined me by the taffrail and was intently listening like myself to "Joe's" yarn, burst out in a regular guffaw, which he had to choke his fist into his mouth to suppress; for, any such violent expression of merriment was totally at variance with the discipline of a man-of-war and had to be checked at once for the good of the service!
"I don't see how that information can be of any use to his friends, Stormcock," said Mr Fortescue Jones, with a coarse laugh. "We can't very well put up a tombstone over him in the Bay of Biscay." "For shame, sir!" exclaimed little Tom Mills, who was huddled up crying in a corner of the gunroom, Dick Popplethorne having been an old home friend. "Don't make fun of the po-poor fellow now he's dead!"
"All ready for letting fall, sir," the middy stationed in the foretop was the first to sing out. This was Dick Popplethorne, a smart lad, who prompted the topmen under his charge to emulate his ready example, so as to get ahead of the others. Larkyns at the maintop was a good second, while Adams at the mizzen was the last; the officer of the watch, on hearing his hail, reporting "All ready!"
Of course Adams and Larkyns and Popplethorne had to scramble up to their posts in the mizzen and main and foretops, much to my admiration and envy; for, being only a cadet, I was not allowed to go aloft except for drill, and then only under special supervision, as I will presently tell.
Naturally everybody in the gunroom was full of the accident, the fellows all thinking more of poor Dick Popplethorne when dead, for the moment at least, than they had ever done while he was living; and I, myself, could not help remembering the strange coincidence of his laughing over Mr Jellaby's yarn about the marine as we were sailing down Channel only a few days before and being especially merry over the young sentry's mistake in calling out "Dead boy" when the bell struck.
"It's poor Popplethorne," said Charley Gilham, the third lieutenant, who had rushed up to the poop from amidships, where he had been stationed, to take command of the lifeboat. "He fell from the upper rigging as he was climbing up into the foretop.
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