Part 13

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!"

I got out the printed call-book, but no K K K there.

"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----

I kept calling it out and Furlong kept banging it away on the key.

The flag-lieutenant sticks his head in. "What shall the commissary yeoman do with the tobacco and the tea?"

Furlong hollers to tear out the tin-foil and bring it up to him. They brought it up, and a couple of Slavs, who had been working the tallow into the shape of condensing-plates--helped out by two electric fans and a stream of ice-water playing on them--they wrap the tin-foil around the tallow plates.

"Mould some more!" yells Furlong--"and keep mouldin' 'em!"

As fast as one set would melt, out they'd ship another. There was plenty of tallow--those Russian ships they're greasy with tallow--and dozens of cases of tobacco and Lord knows how many boxes of tea. It was a stirring sight below, with a dozen or so wild Slavs in their underclothes smashing things open with axes and tobacco and tea flying around regardless. Every blessed Russian that had a samovar and could get hold of hot water begins to make tea. There must have been a division of them sitting around between decks--at two in the morning--drinking hot tea and sweating like horses, for it was hotter than--oh, but it was hot that night!

"More tallow plates!" yells Furlong.

They had a carpenter's mate drafted below, a Finlander with a good eye, and he was cutting out swell plates with a chisel, and as fast as he did they would wrap them in the tin-foil and the two Slavs would squeeze them into place.

Sure-enough sea-going condensing-plates those tallow inventions of Furlong's were, and they did the business till the chief engineer reported he had steam up, and we started to put out. "And now," says the flag-lieutenant to Furlong, "your noble exertions are to be rewarded. You shall see how we shall catch that _Plantagenet_ ship!"

"And a good job," I says to Furlong. "I hope they blow her out of water when they do get her." Which sets him to studying.

"Say, Cahalan," he asks, "you don't suppose they'd do that?"

"Why not?"

"They'd have to prove she sent the wireless messages. Even I couldn't prove that any man aboard her ever sent a wireless message," says Furlong, "let alone that they sent any to the Japs about us."

"No matter," I says. "Everybody aboard here believes she did. And you know she did. And if you'd seen those wild Slavs prancing around between decks awhile ago, I bet you some of 'em wouldn't wait too long to slip out a torpedo surreptishus-like from the torpedo chamber."

Furlong lays down his head-gear and ponders awhile. "If I thought there was any danger--say, Cahalan--suppose his wife--the wireless chap's--is aboard, as she probably is?" He reaches for the key.

"What're you goin' to do now?" I asks.

"I'm going," he says, "if those home-made, unpatented tallow condenser-plates will hold for just one more charge--I'm going to tell the _Plantagenet_ that a Russian battle fleet is headin' her way and for her to steam to the south'ard about as fast as she can go and to keep on steaming."

He fills the bird-cage gadjet with green and blue flashes again and kept filling it till the tallow plates melted into a pool of grease.

The pool of grease hardened into a flat cone of tallow on the deck. "Did you get it away?" I asks him.

"We'll soon see," he says.

When we made steam and got well outside, all we saw, far down on the horizon, was a streak of black smoke going wide open to the south'ard. The admiral let her go--with that start and she good for twenty-one knots he had to. And while we were watching, up comes the commissary yeoman to complain to the flag-lieutenant. When he came to put the tobacco back in the boxes there was sixty-four plugs shy and thirteen more had bites out of them.

The flag-lieutenant said he did not see how he could help the commissary yeoman; and then, being pretty tired, we turned in.

When we woke up we were at anchor in Vladivostok.

They thought Furlong was all right after that, and wanted him to start right in and overhaul a wireless plant in their yard ashore. He could be an officer if he desired, they said.

"What d'y'think of it, Cahalan?" he says.

"They're good people, the Russians," I said, "and I like 'em. But I like my own people better, and I will not. I'm going back home."

"And me," he says.

And we did, or back to the nearest thing to it--a cruiser of our own which happened to be to anchor in Chee Foo.

Dan Magee: White Hope

That night in the forec's'le Tom was telling them how he got the word of the Jeffries-Johnson fight.

"I sights her smoke to the west'ard, the sun just risin'. But it came to me that mebbe a great steamer like her wouldn't like it to be held up by a couple o' Grand Bank trawlers in a dory, an' I mentions that to Jack there, but Jack says: 'You know how they all want to know aboard the vessel, 'specially the cook.'"

The cook looked up to say dejectedly: "I'd ha' forgiven you."

"Jack handed me his oil jacket for a signal o' distress, an' I lashes it to the blade of an oar an' lashes th' oar to a for'ard thwart an' sits down an' waits.

"Along she comes, an' she cert'nly was the grand sight comin'. The len'th an' height of her, and a wave to her bow an' stern would swamp a dory! An' her bridge! Miles away 'twas high as some flyin' thing. On she comes a-roarin'--twenty-six knots, no less. An' almost atop of us she stops. An' I looks up at her, an' a gold-braided lad in blue he leans over the side rail o' th' bridge an' he says: 'What's wrong with you chaps?'

"An' I looks up an' says: 'Who won?'

"An' he says: 'What d'y'mean--who won?'

"An' I says: 'God, man! where you been the last few days ashore? Who won th' fight?'

"A couple other gold-braided lads 'd joined the first, an' behind them four or five rail-polishers was bobbin' up an' down. An' then came a fat-whiskered lad an' bustles all the others out o' his way, an' one o' the others hands him a little megaphone, an' he leans over the rail an' he says: 'You Yankee beggars, do I understand that you're holdin' up a ship of our class, and we, bearin' the roy'l mails, to ask who won a bloody prize-fight?'

"An' I says: 'Ferget y'ur class an' y'ur roy'l mails--who won th' fight?'

"There was a couple o' hundred o' passengers mebbe by this time along the top rail--men an' women, in night-dresses an' bath-robes the women, the men in Chinese trousers they looked like to me. An' a lad in a blue one of 'em he sings out: 'There's sporting blood for you!' an' he grabs another lad in a pink one an' says: 'Look--those two down there want to know who won the fight'; an' then sings out to us: 'Say, you're all right, you two?' An' just then the whiskered one on the bridge, he sings out--what was it he said, Jack?"

Jack quoted: "'Will the first-cabin passengers understand that I am thoroughly capable of carrying on all the necessary conversation with these people in regard to this matter?'"

"An' I was gettin' mad, an' I says: 'To blazes with y'ur nessary conversation, you pot-bellied loafer--who won th' fight?' An' at that the passenger that'd first butted in he makes a megaphone of his hands an' he sings out: 'Johnson!'