"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.