The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) Read Online Free PDF Page A

him. “Mose really brought it in beautifully, letting the tail drag in the water to take off as much airspeed as possible before he let the wing settle in. He landed so close to Striker that I was able to motor alongside in just a couple minutes. Those rascals barely got their feet wet.”
    “Yeah, he’d gotten really good in it by that time. Gene Debs always used to say that he’d have made a helluva fighter pilot.” What neither you nor Gene Debs is likely to ever know, he thought, it is that ol’ Mose WAS a fighter pilot. In the Luftwaffe.
    Jack tooted shave-and-a-haircut as they neared the end of the gravel road leading to Gene Debs’s. Both the crop duster, an ex-Navy Stearman N2S biplane trainer, and the Piper J-3 Cub sat outside the hangar, their tie-downs looped through massive eyebolts sunk into old concrete-filled truck tires. Gene Debs leaned his lanky frame out of the front door, threw a quick wave their way, and ducked back inside. “There’s the old buzzard,” Jack laughed. “Both those birds look like they’re ready to fly.”
    “Well, I hope the J-3 is, anyway,” Linda said. “Gene Debs’s a pretty good-sized guy, from the quick look that I got.”
    “Yeah, he is. Tall, anyway. That ol’ retired CPO’s still got a couple inches on me.”
    “CPO?”
    “Chief Petty Officer. One of the guys, he says, that really run the Navy.”
    “I thought you had to be an officer to fly.”
    “Not during the ’30’s and ’40’s; the Navy’s budget wouldn’t handle the payroll for the number of pilots they needed, so they put quite a few enlisted men through flight training. When they earned their wings they were designated Naval Aviation Pilots. He was actually promoted to Lieutenant j.g. during the war, but it was just temporary rank. To hear him tell it, he was tickled to death to put his Chief’s hat back on when the war was over. In his words, “I’m a goddam chief, and goddam proud of it.”
    Jack parked the wagon a short walk from the house’s front steps. “By the way,” she said, opening the passenger-side door.
    “What?”
    “The only Gene Debs that I’ve ever heard of, before now, was some kind of radical labor leader. Is your uncle named after him?”
    “Yeah. I’ll tell you about Miz Rose on the way back to town.”
    “I’ll be looking forward to that,” she said as Gene Debs walked out onto the porch.
     
    “I like that guy,” Linda declared, flushed from an hour’s flying in the J-3 and the bottle of Carling Red Cap ale that followed it. “He’s got your green eyes.”
    “Or vice-a-versa. Offhand, I’d say he sorta took a shine to you, too,” Jack said, grinning broadly. “He’d never say it, but from a couple of looks that he gave me I could tell he was wondering how the hell I came up with you.”
    “Yeah, he was sporting a pretty good set of horns. Never been married, you said.”
    “That, as he would say, is affirmative.”
    “Hence his preference for Atlanta as the place to sew his wild oats. Hard for a lady to corner a guy who lives a hundred miles away.”
    “I’d say your instinct’s pretty good. But since he keeps that part of his life very much to himself, it’s only a guess. But as far as I know he’s never gone so far as to hold hands with anyone from around here.”
    “Pretty cagey old fart. Like someone else we know. By the way.”
    “What?”
    “When I asked you if he was named after Gene Debs the radical, you said you’d tell me about somebody named Miz Rose. There’s obviously some connection.”
    “Miz Rose,” Jack said, “Was my Granny. Apparently she picked up some socialist baggage while she was away at school, and when her firstborn appeared he got tagged with the name of her hero du jour, good ol’ Eugene Debs, who ran for President from a prison cell.”
    “I’ll be damned. She must’ve been quite a woman.”
    “I reckon. Never got to know her.”
    “You didn’t?”
    “Nope. She was killed in a car accident before