"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.