For nearly a twelvemonth the Ibex was Rollo Vyse's pride and delight. She was a good sea-boat, her engines had never once let her owner down. "Vyse's luck" was almost proverbial in Fowey. If he said he would return to harbour on a certain day, he always did so, although on some occasions the Polruan fishermen shook their heads as they climbed the hill and gazed towards the surf-swept Gribben. "That there motyboat'll drown 'un sure as sure," they would declare; but the sight of the Ibex pounding the heavy seas as she passed the rocky ledges around Punch's Cross, and entered the land-locked harbour, compelled them to admit that for the present their cheerful prognostications were somewhat adrift.
But into Rollo Vyse's Eden had arrived the serpent under the name of one Jim Vardo—a good fellow and all that sort of thing, according to Rollo's admission. Vardo without the Spitfire was quite all right. It was Vardo with the Spitfire that upset Rollo.
Why? Simply because the Spitfire did twelve and a half knots to the Ibex's eleven.
Vyse was not a racing man as far as marine motoring went, but when the Spitfire seemed to make a point of going almost everywhere the Ibex went, and overhauled her every time, there was a supercilious, self-satisfied look upon Vardo's face that made even easy-going Rollo Vyse squirm.
"Wait till I get him out in a stiff sou'wester," muttered Rollo. "I'll knock spots off his old orange-box."
But that opportunity never came, for the simple reason that Vardo hadn't the real love of the sea. He himself admitted that he was cautious; Rollo with characteristic bluntness declared that Vardo was "white-livered." At any rate, the Spitfire never showed her nose beyond the mouth of Ready Money Cove when there were white horses in the Channel.
The fact that in smooth water the Spitfire could show her heels to the Ibex decided the latter's fate. Vyse decided to sell her and purchase another motor-cruiser, larger, more powerfully-engined and capable of developing fifteen and a half knots. Then Jim Vardo's loose-lipped, mealy-mouthed features wouldn't wear that fatuous grin.
Accordingly, the Ibex was sold to a Southampton yachtsman, subject to delivery at that port; and now arose the problem how Vyse was to get her round.
It was late in the year. His chums rather jibbed at the suggestion that they should form a crew. Had it been Cowes week they would have clamoured for the vacant berth; for although the Ibex was arranged as a single-hander, and Rollo often had taken her out alone, the passage between Fowey and the Wight was rather too long for a one-man show.
Rollo was getting jumpy. November was well advanced. No amateur help was forthcoming. He was about to take the unwelcome step of engaging a professional hand when a deus ex machina in the person of Sub-Lieutenant Gerald Broadmayne appeared upon the scene.