“Am I browned, then—scorched?”
“Are you scorched brown! No, you are scorched black! Where are your eyebrows? I say, Dick, those two little patches of hair in front of your ears that you believed were whiskers beginning to shoot—they’re quite gone. No, not quite; there’s a tiny bit left in front of your right ear.”
The conscious lad clapped his hands up to the sides of his face.
“I say, not so bad as that, is it, Frank? No games; tell us the truth.”
“Games? No, I’m too sore to be making game,” cried Murray, and he gazed carefully at both sides of his messmate’s cheeks. “You’re scorched horribly, and the whisker shoots are all gone—No, there’s about half of one left; and you’ll have to shave that off, Dick, so as to balance the other bare place. No, no; it’s all right; that’s not hair, only a smudge of sooty cinder off your burnt cap. I say, you do look a beauty, Dick.”
“Oh, I say!” groaned the youth, patting his tingling cheeks tenderly.—“Here, what are you grinning at, sir?” he cried, turning upon the wounded sailor angrily.
“Beg pardon, sir. Was I grinning?” said the sailor apologetically.
“Yes; and he can’t help it, Dick. Don’t be hard upon the poor fellow; he has had a spear through the top of his shoulder. But you do look an object! Enough to make a cat laugh, as they say.”
“Well, I don’t see that there’s anything to laugh at.”
“No, old fellow, because you can’t see your face; but I say, you can see mine.”