Air pilots -- Fiction; Interpersonal relations -- Fiction; Sabotage -- Fiction; United States. Army. Air Service -- Fiction
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!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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