No sooner was the notion entertained, than it was put into execution. His rubber-soled shoes enabled him to walk over the deck with an entire absence of noise. He took off the sail-covers, and with his broad shoulders and muscular arms, he found no difficulty in hoisting her mainsail, though perhaps there was a wrinkle or two which he would have preferred to get rid of. Her head-sails were mere child’s-play; and presently, he cast off her moorings, lowered them quietly overboard, and hurried aft to the tiller. With a gentle breeze from the north-west, the pretty boat yielded to the pressure of her snow-white canvas, and with an almost imperceptible incline to her mast, moved quietly out from the crowd of others among which she had been lying. Silently she slid through the placid and unruffled waters of the river, splashed with the white light of many a bright star, and with the redder gleams of the many riding-lamps, obeying every touch of her helm so readily as to send a thrill of pleasure through Mervyne’s veins as he cleverly worked her into the open and pointed her head seawards. And indeed, with a lovely yacht beneath one’s feet, with a fair wind, a calm sea, and a brilliant promise of dawn, the man must be sluggish indeed who does not experience a keen sense of enjoyment.
Once clear of the river and with a good offing, he turned her head eastwards, making a course for Portland Bill. The wind was, as he had imagined, in the north-west, and it being off the land, and by no means strong, the sea was extremely smooth and in places even glassy. The little beauty sped along on her course, making no fuss whatever, peeling the bright water evenly away from the polished surface of her sharp bow, and running it aft with a gentle little hiss, and only the faintest, dimmest suggestion of a shadowy wake astern. Mervyne would have liked to get her topsail up, but this he could not well attempt alone, and he feared to wake Hetherington, for, having got out of the harbour, he was now possessed with a boyish desire to see how far on his course he could reach before his chum awoke: however, the tide was in his favour, and he was making splendid way as it was, so, lighting his pipe, he gave himself up to all the exquisite enjoyment of the situation. The beautiful coast, with its brilliant colouring of vivid green and warm red, familiar to him as an oft studied book, was itself a constantly changing object of interest and admiration; each trawler, with the early sun gleaming through the shining mists of morning upon her tanned canvas, was transfigured into a fairy barque, with sails of red and burnished gold. Even the long ugly steamers, with their graduated train of smoke fading away into the limitless haze astern of them, betrayed no vestige of their commonplace origin, but seemed to float in mid-air, shadowy and impalpable, throwing ever and anon a gleam of light from off their bows, more like a flash of summer lightning than the foam of churning water; while the buoyant motion of the little craft beneath him, the noiseless speed with which she sliced her way through the dimpling wavelets, the instant and intelligent response which she gave to the faintest movement of the helm, left him absolutely without a shadow to dim his sense of placid contentment.
He began to hope that Hetherington would sleep on for ever. So he smoked on, and noted with satisfaction that with the rising sun the breeze was freshening fast: little waves now lifted up their smiling heads and plashed playfully at the pretty craft as she cut through them; the tall mast inclined more decidedly before the eager wind; and the foot of the mainsail began its welcome chorus of flip-flip, flip-flip-flip as the breeze poured out of it. Berry Head was long past; Torbay was crossed; the Thatcher and the Oarstone were left faint and filmy in the far distance on the port quarter, and now the little vessel was getting a trifle more lively as the water deepened and the wind increased and the shore receded further and further; and still Hetherington slept. Mervyne could still hear him snoring at times. It was rather odd, he thought. Lazy fellow! He need not have been so careful not to wake him. He wondered what time it was. He took out his watch. Eight o’clock! And he was getting hungry too. He had better wake him; so, without leaving the helm, he began thumping over his chum’s head on the deck with a stick. ‘Hi! Hetherington! Jack! Wake up! Turn out! Get up, you lazy dog! Eight bells, do you hear?’
But not a sound did he evoke in response; only, as he stopped and listened, the same loud snoring broke upon his ear. Very odd! Hetherington was not usually so late or so heavy a sleeper. Next he slid back the hatch and shouted loudly to his chum to rouse up. Still no answer—still the same stertorous breathing.
‘Why on earth don’t he wake?’ said Mervyne to himself, and, trusting the yacht to steer herself for a moment or two, he dived down the little hatchway and entered the tiny cabin. It was empty! He stared around in blank astonishment, nearly amounting to dismay, and as he did so, a snore of almost gigantic volume assailed his ears. It came from the forecastle. This was more surprising than ever, for Hetherington, he knew, had no crew on board. An enthusiastic yachtsman, he, in true Corinthian spirit, worked his little craft himself, with the assistance of one or two good friends and fellow-spirits like Phipps—no paid hands being permitted on board during a Corinthian race—and even when cruising, scrubbed decks and polished brasswork with his own hands, sleeping also on board in harbour, unlike men of more luxurious habits, who generally preferred the comforts of a hotel to the straitened accommodation of a five-tonner, even when it was their own.
Where, then, was Hetherington? and who was the occupant of the forecastle? He slid aside the little door which separated the cabin from the quarter assigned to the crew, when such an individual existed, and looked in. It was very dark in the little close den, but he could just discern a hammock stretched fore and aft under the deck, and in that hammock a bearded being sleeping a riotous sleep. He went up to the hammock and shook it. ‘Here! rouse up, here! Where’s your master?’ he cried.
The figure grunted, shifted its position slowly and uneasily, and seemed inclined to settle once more into repose, but the shaking being repeated and continued with increasing violence, a weather-stained, lurid, and sodden countenance, set in a wild tangle of hair and beard, appeared over the edge of the hammock, and after staring stupidly with vacant eyes a moment or two into the gloom, inquired thickly and with gin-saturated utterance, ‘Wash up?’ and then falling heavily back on its pillow, instantly resumed its state of stertorous insensibility. The man was hopelessly and helplessly drunk. But who could he be?
At that moment, a terrible suspicion flashed through Mervyne’s mind like an electric shock. He turned, and bolted through the little cabin and up on deck like a shot. The first thing that caught his eye as he faced aft was the brass rudder-head, and on it, in necessarily small letters, unperceived by him before, was the one word, Cockyollybird. It was the wrong yacht!
Hetherington and Phipps both agree in asserting that they never had such a race as that in which they won the first prize at Dartmouth; but the former also adds that that fellow O’Gorman gave a lot of trouble before paying up the hundred pounds.