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.