Once hove to we shortened down for the night under lower tops'ls and storm stays'ls. The death of Aahee was tragic in the extreme; Kahemuku cried in his bunk, and no means could be found to stop him. Black Joe said nothing, he ate in silence, and when we went below he turned in without a word.
They were one less to starboard; only a weak brown man gone, a poor piece of human wreckage washed loose from that plaything of the storm, a ship at sea.
CHAPTER XXVIII
[AUSTRALIA'S STORY]
Following Frenchy's sickness, Australia and I chummed together as Frenchy, by common consent, was allowed to perch on a coil of rope on the main hatch just forward of the mast during the night watches, the mate winking at this whenever the weather was not too bad.
On such nights Australia and I would stump the wet deck and we got to be very good friends. Unlike so many of the crew, I remember his name, John Roth, and from what he told me at various times I knew that he had come from a good family, as such things go, people in easy circumstances. His grandfather had settled in England, coming originally from southern Germany, and his father had taken over and extended a business founded at that time. Roth had received a good education, evidently, though he was of a shiftless temperament and his talk savored of the fo'c'sle and not the schools. He unburdened himself as we tramped the deck and I found him to be a charming companion and much deeper than was my idea of the devil-may-care deserter from the Falls of Ettrick, who had impressed me as a sort of scatterbrained ne'er-do-well, when we first bumped against each other in the fo'c'sle of the Fuller, for my bunk was ahead of his, as we settled down in that first mixup, months before.