I just re-read Oscar's posts that I had re-posted earlier in this thread. (Your partial quote, Miller, looks to be from a different one of Oscar's posts -- not better, not worse, just different.) It looks to me like he was saying, as you infer, that he quenched from a temperature above the critical temp of the case, but below that for the core. He always did a careful pre-anneal.

He also had a very precise temp controller that he built, precise within a few degrees.

Fred