“James McGraw,” Hennessey muttered under his breath, “when I find you, I am going to have you skinned. No. Nevermind that – I’ll do the skinning m’self.”

From To the Upper Air:

So – I very much see Admiral Hennessey as one of those men in an exalted position that didn’t get there through buying his way up through the ranks. I see him as someone who’s a bit more rough around the edges than he likes to admit in polite company, born a commoner and got to where he is through hard work and no small measure of shrewdness, so he generally knows what he’s about, and yet here – he has absolutely no clue what’s going on. He’s more than a little bit scared – he hasn’t heard from James in weeks, and the last time he did hear from him, they were having a kind of argument that wasn’t quite resolved. He knows that James has gotten involved with Thomas, and he doesn’t trust Thomas one tiny little bit. He’s afraid that the sudden breach that’s opened between himself and James might push his son to do something reckless, and he can’t for the life of him figure out what he’s done that has caused James to mistrust him, although he knows there’s something. In short – he’s feeling strong emotion, and so his accent slips just a bit and shows a bit of the man underneath the wig, so to speak. I kind of wanted to show a bit more of his personality here, because we don’t get to see too much of him as a person in the previous scene, other than that he’s not a total ogre and has heart enough to take in a frightened boy who had nowhere else to go. He doesn’t mean a word of this, of course, but under ordinary circumstances he’d be having a sharp word with James because there are rules, damn it!

In the larger story – idk, this is just a short little character beat that functions to show us that Hennessey is searching for James so that his later appearance doesn’t come completely out of the blue and ruin the flow of the story through too much exposition.