“You’ll be in command of Flight Three of the squadron, Slim, after the ships get here and the boys come in. At present that flight’s got one sergeant first class in charge, and two mechanics. Later it’ll have four sergeants, meaning one crew chief apiece for the ships, and eight mechanics. Your flight sergeant is Marston, a good man, although peculiar. Better stroll down and get acquainted with him, eh? You’ll probably use him as mechanic on these trips of yours.”
I strolled down to hangar fourteen which, it seemed, was to house the ships of Flight Three for the summer, and heard voices from the little tool room partitioned off in one corner of said iron structure. There wasn’t a ship in the flight, of course, so the mechanics were about as busy as so many Congressmen.
As I approached the door there cut through the murmur of talk a loud, vulgar voice, heavy as lead, deep as the guile of the heathen Chinee and rough as a Texas boulevard. Unless I was badly mistaken, those vocal cords belonged to nobody but Major George William Marston, and Georgy stood about as high in my estimation as a rattlesnake, and that’s right on the ground.
I wondered what in —— he was doing at Langham Field. I hadn’t heard his name mentioned. It made the summer prospect look very dark, not to say drear. Add George William to a field which Lamb Johnson was already cluttering up with his presence, and you’ve got a madhouse made to order for any godly young flyer.
George William had been only a first lieutenant when I was one of the scared, diffident young cadets whose lives were made miserable because they stood in constant threat of discharge, and discharge meant that the dream of a lifetime, to fly, was shattered as completely as a glass dropped off the top floor of the Woolworth building.
George William had been in charge of the cross-country stage, and he did his —— to get me kicked out because I was an hour late on making Seguin, the town I was bound for on my first cross-country trip. I got lost—sure. But I found my course again and I got there.
He disliked me primarily because I am physically, mentally and spiritually unable to feel as if any man who ranks me is automatically first assistant to ——, and one day when he called me a fighting name I took the opportunity to interview him alone and notify him sincerely that the next time he got personal with me I’d endeavor earnestly to hang his nose approximately under his left ear and do a quick job of rough and ready plastic surgery on his entire face.
He had been an old army sergeant, and he was a twenty-minute egg with a yolk made of gall and wormwood and an idea that saluting and saying “sir” were the ends and objects of a cadet’s existence.
In a group of kiwis—the kiwi is a mythical Australian bird which has wings but can’t fly—who were jealous of flyers and made their lives miserable, he was the non plus ultra, the sine qua non and likewise anything else which you can think of abutting closely on a total loss.
Well, I had become a full-fledged officer since then, so I ambled in that little tool room. There were two privates sitting there, and a sergeant. And the sarge was none other than my old friend, George William Marston!