Now to make conversation Jerry was bold enough to interrupt this song by inquiring what exactly was meant by the "dead man's throttle." Doctor Syn stopped in his walk and looked at him, filling two tots of rum, one of which he handed to Jerk, tossing off the other himself and saying:
"Ah, you may well ask that, sonny. I don't know exactly myself, but I suppose if poor Pepper was to come in here now and throttle us, man and boy—him being stone dead, as we both well know—well, we should be having the 'dead man's throttle' served on us!"
"Oh, I see!" replied Jerk with interest. "Then I take it that the rest of the song has some shreds of meaning, too? What's the 'tank' that the corpses float round in, sir?"
"The sea," replied the Doctor, "the sea; that's the great tank, my lad, and that there are corpses enough floating round in it, I don't think you and I could doubt."
"That's plain and true enough," said Jerk, "but I don't see no sense about the 'dead man's teeth in the bottle.'"
"That's plain enough," said the Doctor, taking a stiff swig from the black bottle itself; "it was in England's day that I wrote that. He cut a nigger's head off with a cutlass because the rascal was drinking his best rum on the sly, and the shock, as he died, made the black brute bite through the glass neck of the bottle."
