On reaching the deck, the lieutenant came up to the captain with poor Popplethorne’s cap, turning it over as he presented it to him to draw his attention to it.
It was torn and bloody on one side.
“The topman was right, sir, you see,” he said to Captain Farmer. “He must have struck some part of the ship heavily when he fell from aloft before going overboard.”
“Yes,” replied the captain. “I see.”
Just then, Mr Jellaby, who had gone forward in the meantime to see if there were any traces there of the accident, returned aft, looking more serious than I had ever seen him before.
“His head struck against one of the flukes of the sheet-anchor, sir,” he reported to Captain Farmer who had sent him on the errand. “The bill of it, just abaft the fore-rigging to port, is now spattered with the poor little chap’s brains. I wonder nobody observed it before, sir.”
“He would, therefore, have been killed instantly and did not suffer any pain,” said the captain. “Poor young fellow, poor young fellow! He was a most promising lad and always smart at his duty!”
“Trim sails!” cried out the commander at this juncture, in a voice husky with emotion; as if anxious to hide his feelings, now that the captain had pronounced his requiem to the memory of our late shipmate. “Brace up the mainyard!”
At once our sails filled, when the ship was put upon her course again; and, the watch being then set, we all went below, the boatswain piping the hands down to supper, for it was nearly Three Bells and more than an hour after the usual time for that meal.
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.