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.