He was in the chains and on his way up to the top before the lieutenant spoke, and naturally he had first addressed him.
‘Ugly,’ however, was so sluggish in his movements through the corvette rolling a bit and the ratlines being none too steady, that Lieutenant Robinson grew impatient.
“Here, you boy!” he roared at me even louder than Jones had spoken to him shortly before. “See if you can’t teach that lubber how to climb aloft and free a flag when he is told, without taking a month of Sundays over the job!”
Almost before he had spoken I had sprung into the rigging after ‘Ugly’; and by the time the lieutenant’s last word was uttered I was more than half-way up to the top, overhauling ‘Ugly’ at the crosstrees.
From thence, he and I proceeded upward, he on one side of the mast, I on the other, and neither speaking a word as we shinned up the ‘Jacob’s ladder.’
So we climbed up to the cap of the topgallant-mast in company; but, as far apart as the poles, though so close together.
Then, each of us set about in his own fashion, without minding the other, to disentangle the fly of the pennant, which had been whipped by the wind round the halliards till it had formed itself into half a dozen granny’s knots.
We were holding on to the royal lift and brace, both of us, each with one hand while with the other we tried to unloose the closely knotted bunting, our faces almost touching each other, and still without ever saying a word; when, all at once, through some one having neglected his duty when the topgallant-mast was sent aloft after the gale, the ends of the lift and brace slipped off the jack, to which they had been only loosely secured, leaving ‘Ugly’ and I suspended in the air partly by the signal halliards and partly by the flag, which latter parted with a ripping sound that I hear now in my ears as I speak of it. Aye, and as I always shall hear it, I believe!
I heard also at the time, confused cries and orders from below, singing out I know not what.
My companion’s face was close to mine as we swung from the feeble cord and more fragile stuff that interposed between us and eternity; a fall to the deck beneath or into the sea meaning death in one way or the other, either by drowning or by a more cruel fate.