LUKE “CATWALK” JACKSON, a black seventeen year old, left his sharecropper home in Mississippi because there were too many mouths to feed.  He was thrown into a violent world under the worst possible circumstances—a black man in a white, unforgiving society.

Sixteen year old, ABRAHAM “CURLY” LEVITZ has been on the road for only two months when he meets Luke while they’re trying to raid the same hen house.  They get run off by a shotgun wielding farmer, but form a friendship that will endure for twenty years through the toughest times imaginable.

Luke and Curly depend on each other as they are pursued by a racist deputy in the lawlessness of the early 1930s.  Relying on their road smarts and tempered-steel toughness, they survive a near hanging, a phony murder charge and tragic lost love in the depths of the depression.

In spite of all their problems, however, the boys persevere. You have to read this to find out how Luke and Curly rise from vagrants to become owners of one of the nation’s leading airlines.

Then, when they think their bad times are behind them, an old nemesis shows up, but he doesn’t count on the shrewd resourcefulness of two men who’ve been hardened by life’s brutality. The thrilling conclusion takes place in the skies over Mexico.