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!"

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. An............