“You’ve been great! If I ever go West, I’ll look you up!”
“Well, I got to shake now, buddy,” Panama said, reaching for his bag. “Keep a stiff upper lip and I’ll bet another five bucks you come out on top!”
After the Marine had gone, Lefty walked to the window and watched them board the train. He felt a lump rise in his throat and a deplorable feeling of loneliness cast its spell upon the unhappy boy.
When the train was well out of sight, he walked over to where he had left his suitcase. Just ahead of him was one of the regulation colored posters used by the United States Marine Corps in their recruiting campaigns.
He studied the illustration of a manly, healthy looking aviator seated in the cockpit of a Marine plane, and read the caption over, several times.
“The Marine Air Force make men,” he spoke aloud, repeating the announcement printed on the poster. “I wonder what kind of a job they’d make out of me?”
CHAPTER III
Six months of discouragement, six long months of faded dreams, hiding from the world’s laughter and literally running away from himself, was what Lefty had undergone since that eventful November afternoon in New Haven’s great sports stadium when a football game had changed the entire course of his life.
He wandered from city to city and job to job, meeting with some success momentarily until the usual thing happened—someone recognized him and he again became the center of ridicule.
It would always be the same: The minute his true identity would come to light and the first mention made of the day he had ran backward, Lefty would fly away from it all, disappearing to some other city, burning his bridges behind him, watching his dreams fade while he strove to build new air castles elsewhere.