"Perhaps she is some new ship," says Furlong, "or an old one with a
plant installed since the last list was put out. Quiet now--maybe I
can recognize the sending." He listened; and "No"--he shook his head
thoughtfully. "And yet--wait--Sh-h--" he jams the head-gear harder to
his ears. "Well, what d'y' think o' that! It's that lobster off the
old _Nippon_--nearly two years since I've taken him."
"That married----"
"Yes," he says.
"And still on the _Plantagenet_, d'y' s'pose?"
"Must be. I know him now like I'd know his voice, or his signature.
And she's not far off either--coming strong!"
"Then they must 'a' seen that supply-ship and her fool skipper parading
in to-night."
"That's what. Sh-h--he's using a cipher code, and merchantmen don't
use cipher codes to each other. I'll ask him what his call is."
He makes the blue lights sputter again and listens. And in a few
seconds almost jumps out of his chair. "We got him! He says he's the
_Grand Knight_ of the China and Indian Line, but last night while I was
sitting here doing nothing I raised the _Grand Knight_--she was in
Formosa Strait then and bound south. But I'll give him OK, and see
what he does then." Which he did, and waited another while.
The _Plantagenet_ kept pumping away, calling the cipher letter over and
over, Furlong said--he listening in and trying to dope things out. By
and by he made up his mind she must be trying to raise some plant
ashore, probably a station on the Japanese coast in touch with Togo's
fleet. "If we could only get on to her cipher," says Furlong; and,
after another thinking spell: "It's sure to be something made up in a
hurry. And I don't believe that _Nippon_ chap's got overmuch
invention. Here, look here, Cahalan. Three-quarters of all quick-made
codes are one way, when it's an amateur makes 'em up in a hurry--it's
mostly to push letters forward or back three or four or five or ten
places. Here, get to work with this pad and pencil."
I take the _Plantagenet's_ right call--P G--and slips them forward and
back, and sure enough seven letters forward gives him W N, the same
she'd been sending with the K K K. When I'd got that far Furlong,
listening hard, said she'd got an answer and was giving her
position--ten miles southeast of Hai-po Bay, which was the little place
we were laying into.
Furlong kept spelling out the letters as he caught them, and I kept
putting them down and pushing them forward seven till it read:
_Russian-battle-ship-and-three-trans-ports-are_--just that far when
Bing! Furlong breaks in and begins to send--nothing particular, but
everything he could think of. Every minute or so he'd let up, only to
hear another operator--the K K K one--calling excitedly.
"He wants to get off the rest of that message about us," said Furlong,
and lets the _Plantagenet_ start another letter or two and then breaks
in again. And he kept at it with never a let-up for maybe an hour,
when he notices signs of weakness in our current and sends word to the
flag-lieutenant, who goes below and pretty soon comes up with the
admiral to the shack.
"For how long can you restrain the _Plantagenet_ from sending that
message?" asks the admiral.
"No telling, sir," says Furlong, "but not for a great while. I've had
to pump it in so fast trying to break their waves that I'm afraid I'll
soon burn out our plant."
That worried the old man, who sent word to the chief engineer to rush
the repairs and get up steam as soon as he could. "And if there's
anything you require you have only to demand it," he says to Furlong,
who never stops keeping the wireless on the hop. It was hot in the
wireless shack, with everything closed up tight, and there was the
steady buzzing and about fourteen colored lights flashing at one time
from that bird-cage thing. All I could see were lights, and we had to
yell to hear each other talk. And Furlong, who'd been up then for
sixteen hours on one stretch, the wireless gear strapped to his head
most of the time, was beginning to feel the strain. Nobody to relieve
him either.
To break up their waves Furlong had to keep giving them all he had, and
of course something had to give way. What I know of a wireless outfit
wouldn't rate me heavy in a wireless fleet, but the rotary converter or
something like it became so hot that Furlong said he'd have to have an
electric fan to cool it. "And get it quick!" he calls out after me.
The first fan I spotted was in an officer's room that none of us
admired much. He was a man who would rate a man higher for tying his
neckerchief right than for laying a turret-gun on the target at twelve
thousand yards. He was getting ready to turn in. It was a hot night
and I knew he'd have trouble trying to sleep without a fan, his room
being where it was--near the engine-room ladder--and orders being that
all air-ports be kept closed that night.
Of course, he didn't want to give up his fan. I didn't waste any time
on him--only to say to the flag-lieutenant that it was just the class
of fan that Furlong ordered, and the flag-lieutenant tells the
officer--still kicking he was--that he'd get an order from the admiral
if he desired. On reflection, the officer didn't think a special order
from the admiral was necessary, and in a minute or two I was pumping
nice cold air on the converter with the fan.
Then the brush-holders and the brushes kept getting out of adjustment
or something. They were too light to carry the extra current. Before
this Furlong had passed the word to the chief electrician, and he had
switched on juice enough to run a central office plant ashore. We
fixed up the brushes, and everything was doing fine, I thought, when
all at once Furlong looks across the table and says: "O, Lord! The
condenser-plates!"
I never knew before I was shipmates with any such gadgets, but I look
around and there are four glass plates about an inch thick and a foot
and a half across that the current was boring through.
"Sure enough!" I says--"the condenser-plates going to hell. What'll I
do with them?"
"Find out if there are any thick sheets of glass in the storeroom,"
says Furlong.
There was. Not a lot, for glass lying around loose doesn't stand
overmuch of a chance on any battleship. We got what sheets of glass
were below, but in the hurry of rushing them up topside I fell back
down an iron ladder to the splinter-deck port side aft, and when I hit
it--a two-and-three-quarter-inch chilled steel-plate deck--I near
cracked my skull. And all because I was only trying to save the glass,
holding it out from my body while I was falling. And while I'm trying
to find my feet the officer I'd borrowed the electric fan from rushes
out from his room and was going to put me in the brig for the noise I'd
made. There happened to be enough glass left for another set of
condenser-plates, and while they were cutting it to shape Furlong calls
for another electric fan.
I thinks of a young officer, the freshest one ever, who had an ancestor
related to Peter the Great, and an uncle or granduncle or grandmother
or somebody or other in the family who was even then a general. Now,
of course, there's no great harm in talking a little about your family,
but when you begin to think it gives you a rating to ride over other
people! And the living ancestor was such an old granny of a general,
according to all accounts, and the dead one such an old robber! "Mr.
Kaminoff, sir, has a specially powerful fan," says I to the
flag-lieutenant.
"Yes--O yes--true!" says the flag-lieutenant and bounces down to Mr.
Kaminoff's quarters himself, and Kaminoff didn't know what happened
till he found himself gulping down big gobs of darkness by way of
getting his breath. It was a hell of a hot night, and nobody less than
a four-striper would have dared to leave his port open that night,
because Kaminoffskis or Romanoffskis, the old man made them all toe the
mark when he gave out an order.
The illustrious Kaminoff howled around some in the dark, but nobody
minded him now the powers were sitting on him. When he came out on the
gun-deck in his silk pajamas to get the air, he probably wished he was
an ordinary seaman without any ancestry and owned a hammock to swing to
a couple of hooks somewhere.
By letting that second fan play onto the glass plates they stayed cool
for a time. But only for a time. By and by they showed signs of
melting again. And the flag-lieutenant, deliberating on the
possibility of the _Plantagenet_ getting her message away and the
probability of the Jap fleet bearing down on them if he did get it
away, he sends a man down to the chief engineer to ask again how long
before we could get up steam.
Maybe two hours, said the chief engineer, and Furlong said he'd try to
hold out for two hours more.
But we were getting in a new mess every ten minutes. The keys weren't
heavy enough to stand the continuous pounding under the current Furlong
was giving 'em. One set of points was already burned off--he had to
ship new keys. Then it was back to the new condenser-plates, which
didn't seem to be of the best quality of glass and were beginning to
fuse worse than the old ones. They were going fast and Furlong was
puzzled--for a while. Then--"Tallow!" he hollers, and away hustles the
flag-lieutenant for the paymaster, who was already turned in and sound
asleep 'spite of the heat, for he had a good fan in his room--being the
paymaster. He was shook up, broke out the stores, and four
condenser-plates of tallow were moulded; but as soon as Furlong sees
what kind of tallow it was, he says they couldn't be made to work
without they were coated with tin-foil or something like it.
"Tin-foil? But where shall we obtain tin-foil?" says the
flag-lieutenant. "Have you no tin-foil?" says he to the paymaster, who
said no, he had no such item in his lists.
"There's a lot of tobacco in the canteen and a couple of hundred cases
of tea below," says Furlong to the flag-lieutenant.
"O yes, the tobacco and the tea!" says the flag-lieutenant, and they
send down three or four husky lads to break out the commissary yeoman,
or whatever his rating was, out of his hammock. You could hear him
yelling clear up on the superstructure when they landed him onto the
deck, for by this time half of the ship's crew began to guess that
something was going on, and whoever could get near enough to lay hands
on that commissary yeoman was helping to hustle him along to his shack.
"Ganavitch! ganavitch!" he kept saying, or something like that; and the
flag-lieutenant sent up to Furlong to ask, now they had him, what was
he to do?
"Break out your tobacco and your tea!" yells Furlong, who, with the
receiver strapped to his head and the fingers of one hand pounding the
key and the other motioning me to hurry on the thrilling messages which
I was reading from the back pages of an American magazine:
The - forty - horse - power - Camarac - is - the - machine - how -
about - C. B. & Q. - corsets - to - pinch - in - your - shape - send -
for - our - latest - catalogue - with - illustrations - add - an - inch
- to - your - height - why - be - poor - the - best - abana - cigars -
two - dollars - the - hundred - observe - that - curve - use - the -
instantaneous - safety - razor - no - honing - no - strapping----
For some time before this I'd seen how foolish it was to be straining
your brain inventing messages to send when there they lay ready printed
to your hand, and so 'twas:
--pneumatic - soap - she - floats - why - pay - rent - don't - you -
think - uneeda - wash - write - us - for - free - sample----