Cahalan, of the many voyages, had been reading of the latest marine
near-disaster and the part played therein by the ship's wireless man;
but refused to be impressed.
"The slush the papers print sometimes!" he snorted. "Here's this now
about this SOS fellow--all these papers trying to make out what a
wonder he was, as if it took a wizard to keep pumping out three letters
till somebody heard you. And a hero, too!"
"Why not--he stood by his key, didn't he?"
"Sure he did. And if you and me were wash-women we'd probably stand by
our wash-tubs, wouldn't we? If there was no more danger keeping on
washing than standing around doing nothing, we surely would, wouldn't
we? But nobody'd think of calling us heroes for it, would they? That
SOS man now--if he didn't want to stand by his key he could 've jumped
overboard--it was only a thousand miles to shore. So he stood by his
key and eased his mind by having something to do, which, of course,
makes him a hero."
"It's a great thing just the same, the wireless."
"Sure it is and needs no fake booming, but I like to see a little
brains mixed with it. There was a fellow named Furlong--I ran across
him first in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where our battle-fleet was
rondayvouing for winter drill. I had a month's pay on a fight coming
off in London and was wishing I knew how it came out without waiting a
week or ten days for the New York papers, when Faulkner, the captain's
yeoman, says: 'Why don't you ask Furlong, the wireless operator? He'll
find out for you.'
"But how can he?" says I.
"You people in the deck division," says Faulkner, "you're living in the
past. You fellows want to come out of your sailin'-ship dreams and
steam around and see what's doin' in the world. Furlong'll pick it off
from the Cape Cod station when they're gettin' it from across for the
newspapers."
"From here--from off the ship?" I asks. "Why, I thought the record for
picking up or sending from a ship was six or seven hundred miles."
"Maybe it is," says Faulkner, "but Furlong's specialty is breaking
records."
So I step up to the wireless shack to see Furlong. Regan, the chief
signal quartermaster, was there before me. Regan had a girl in
Brooklyn, and Furlong was getting off Regan's regular evening message
to her about how he was still in good health and still hoped to be back
in the spring and so on by wireless to a station up near New York in
charge of a friend of Furlong's, whose job was to pass it on to a
telegraph-office in Brooklyn just across the street from where the girl
lived. She would have it for breakfast in the morning, and Regan would
have her answer to it some time during the day. A consolation to two
loving hearts it was, and they doing it all winter without it costing
either of them a copper.
I tell Furlong what I'm after. "Sure," he says, and begins to make the
colored lights hop. "And have a cigarette while you're waiting," he
says, "for it will take a few minutes."
I looked around for a match. "Here," says Furlong, and spills a little
alcohol from a bottle onto a copper-looking switch thing and brings
down on that another copper-looking switch thing with a handle--both of
'em sticking out from the bulkhead--and out flows a blue flame six
inches long and I light my cigarette, watching out not to burn the end
of my nose while I'm lighting it. He had the place full of little
gadgets like that.
While we sat there he gives out all the latest news as fast as he grabs
it off, not only about my fight in London, but how the ponies were
running in New Orleans, what Congress was killing time about, which
particular European country was going to war now--all the important
news.
I'm not setting up Furlong for any hero, mind you, but sitting up there
in his little shack on the superstructure, grabbing news like that from
everywhere flying--he made a hit with me. After that if I didn't want
to know any more than was there good skating in Central Park I'd ask
Furlong, and he'd dig up some station or other around New York, make
the blue lights hop, clap the wireless gear to his head, and soon be
telling me all about it.
That spring I was transferred, and didn't see Furlong again for two
years. Then it was in the East--in Hong Kong during the Russo-Japanese
war, both of us paid off and both of us wondering what we'd do, but
Furlong not worrying much about the money end of it. He had plenty of
that, enough anyway to keep him in good clothes and stop at all the
good hotels he cared to for a while. And enough to stake me after I'd
gone broke, too.
In Hong Kong we struck in with another young fellow who was flourishing
around as an American tourist, though Furlong knew him for a wireless
man before he'd been with him an hour, and in less than another hour
knew him for the wireless operator one time on the _Nippon_, a steamer
running from our country to Japan. But he never let on he knew him.
"Suppose he is playing a little game of bluff, where is it my business
to show him up?"
Furlong had come to know the daughter of a purser running on a steamer,
the _Plantagenet_, between Hong Kong and the Japanese ports, and she
was pretty as you please and he taking a great shine to her; after
telling the old man, mind you, that he had been an enlisted man in the
United States navy and was thinking of going back home to Chicago, but
not telling him that his folks back home had bales of money, which
would have put him in right, for the old man did like the chink of hard
coin and was picking up his share on his own little graft--renting his
room to rich passengers when the ship was crowded, picking up a little
more change by doing a little smuggling, and probably in the pay of the
Jap Secret Service on the side.
One evening Furlong, always a sociable chap, brings his wireless friend
around, and another evening, and another. Pretty soon things don't
seem to be running as smooth as they used to for Furlong, but fine for
his wireless friend. "Well, that's all right, too," says Furlong, "if
they like him better than me."
"But no need to give you a frost, is there?" I said.
Things kept growing cooler around the girl's house, so we made up our
minds 'twas about time to get away somewhere, and war being a great
place to forget your troubles, we had a look in at that. We took the
Russian side. We were for the Japs in the beginning, but by this time
nearly all our navy people in the East had swung over to the Russians.
Why? M-m--probably because deep down inside of us we believed the
Russians were nearer our own kind.
Before we left Hong Kong I found out how Furlong's wireless friend had
done for him. With a few drinks in him--me buying the drinks--he
gushes some confidential chatter.
Furlong was in the pay of the Russian Government, was what he told the
foxy old purser. How else could a man so clever--talking and having so
much money to spend as Furlong was spending--how could he have been an
enlisted man in any navy? And he showed a cable--being so easy to fix
up, I wondered why he hadn't made it a wireless--that no man of
Furlong's father's name was living in Chicago. I didn't tell that to
Furlong--not then. Why? Because to my notion he was well clear of a
cheap bunch.
Later we heard she was married to the wireless chap and the pair of
them living off her father. His people had lost all their money in
speculation, so the young fellow told the old man; which left nothing
for the old man to do but get him a job somewhere; which he did, on the
_Plantagenet_, where the wife was aboard, too--to save expenses.
"Kind of tough on her," says Furlong, and maybe it was, though I
couldn't see it. She only got what was coming to her. The woman that
would look at Furlong and not see that he rated a whole division like
the other chap-- But trying to account for young women's judgment of
young men and vice versa, as the old Romans would say, what's the use?
And if we all knew as much as we ought to there would half the time be
no story, would there?
We were both in Port Arthur when things were looking blue for the
Russians. The Japs were hammering away at the forts and the place
filling up with dead and wounded, and all kinds of sickness and fever
flourishing, and medical and food supplies getting pretty low. They
were wondering how they were going to make out, when some topsider said
that if some of the sick and wounded could be got up to Vladivostok it
might save a good many lives and be a great relief to the rest of the
garrison.
There happened to be three transports in the harbor at this time. They
had slipped by the blockade, which wasn't ever any too well kept, the
mines outside being about as dangerous to the Japs as to anybody else.
These three ships would accommodate three thousand sick people. So
they were put aboard, sick and wounded, officers and men--and women,
too, some officers' wives among them.
For a convoy to the transports the best they could detail was a
battleship that had been in an engagement not long before. Pretty well
shot up she was and much doubt would she stand the trip to Vladivostok;
but she was the only one available and out we went, with Furlong as her
wireless operator. There being not too many good wireless men lying
around just then, they counted a lot on him.
Before we left port there was a rumor flying that the Japs had wind of
what we were trying to do; and perhaps that was the reason why when the
battleship had trouble with her machinery on our first day out she
didn't put back to Port Arthur, but put into a little Chinese harbor on
the westerly side of the Yellow Sea. You may think the Chinese
officials wanted to run us out, but they didn't. Maybe they saw the
shadows of the future.
We lay in there all that night, I bunking in with Furlong in the
wireless shack and he on watch every minute. During the night he
picked up the call of a Russian supply-ship--the _Sevastopol_ she
was--and passed the word on to the admiral, who sent back word to tell
her to wait outside till next morning and then follow on, giving her
the next day's course.
Next morning we went belting across the Yellow Sea at eleven
knots--pretty good for us--and we began to think everything was working
fine, when astern, about noon, came up a smoke. Furlong and I could
see her without leaving the wireless shack, which on this Russian
battleship was on the after-bridge. She drew nearer, and something
about her caught my eye. I knew I had seen her somewhere, and, getting
a chance at the chief quartermaster's long glass, I took a peep, and
sure enough--the _Plantagenet_! I didn't say anything, not even when
the flag-lieutenant and the executive were having a great spiel
together as to her being the supply-ship which we expected was coming
astern of us.
Soon a vapor comes up and the stranger fades away, and after thinking
it over, I tell the flag-lieutenant what I felt sure of, and he tells
the admiral, and the old man he has Furlong tell the transports to come
closer, and then he signals them to steam off by the right, and once
more to the right, and again to the right, which brought us after half
an hour or more a couple of miles astern of where we'd been when the
_Plantagenet_ last showed. It was a day of shifting fog and vapor, and
when we raised her again there she was still on the old course, but now
directly ahead of us.
She came and went between puffs of fog vapor. The admiral was
satisfied now that she was the _Plantagenet_, and as she'd long been
suspected of doing secret scout work for the Japs, he began to do some
thinking about her. She was a fast steamer, and all the more use to
the Japs because she wasn't a Jap.
"If she could bring about the capture of this little fleet of ours,
she'd make a lot of money for her owners and officers, wouldn't she?" I
says to Furlong. "And that wireless friend of yours, he'll get an
extra good whack, too, for they'll mostly depend on him, won't they?"
"Yes," says Furlong, "but not if I can stop him."
By and by the admiral comes into the wireless shack himself and tells
Furlong to see if he couldn't raise the strange ship by wireless. But
he couldn't. She wouldn't answer; which made the admiral pretty mad,
and with the fog lifting and we seeing her again, he trained a big gun
on her but didn't fire, though for a second I thought he would--across
her bow anyway.
All that afternoon we held to our course. Another night and day we
hoped to make Vladivostok all right, but coming on to dark our old
wreck of a battleship broke down again. So the old man picked out
another place to put into--on the northern part of the Korean coast we
were now, where the Russian officers were pretty well posted
and--something telling us the Koreans wouldn't bother--we felt safe for
the night. We all figured we had slipped the _Plantagenet_, and so we
had, maybe, only for that blessed supply-ship behind us. She had been
sent a wireless not to anchor till a couple of hours after the rest of
us--after dark.
But she had one of those yap skippers who are always bound to be in the
commander-in-chief's eye, and instead of sneaking in without calling
attention to himself, he comes bowling along, every light aboard her
blazing, and steams like a torch-light procession around the harbor.
She might just as well have lit up and kept her search-lights going,
for as she passed each one of us her lights were blocked off, which
told to any other ship which might be watching outside just how many
ships of us there were to anchor inside. That parading skipper
certainly did get in the old man's eye. If the admiral's message read
anything like it sounded, then that parading skipper must have felt as
good as blown from a turret-gun before he turned in that night.
Later in the night the officer that in our navy we'd call the
flag-lieutenant--a decent kind who talked good English, too--ordered
Furlong to turn in. He had been on continuous duty since we left Port
Arthur. "You can do no more, and you are much fatigued, you require
repose," says the flag-lieutenant. And Furlong thought a little repose
wouldn't hurt either; but before going he thought he would give one
last listen for anything that might be floating around in the wireless
zone.
Right away I saw that something was doing.
"Look up K K K," he says--"quick!"