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.