Emmett Watson is driven home from the Salina juvenile facility by the warden to find the family farm being repossessed by the bank.

Billy shows Emmett nine postcards from their absent mother, all postmarked along the Lincoln Highway, and proposes they follow her trail to San Francisco.

Duchess and Woolly climb out of the warden's trunk and propose that Emmett drive them to the Adirondacks to steal $150,000 from Woolly's family safe.

Duchess steals Emmett's Studebaker and the envelope of cash while Emmett searches the St. Nicholas's orphanage in Lewis, Nebraska.

Emmett and Billy stow away in an eastbound freight boxcar, heading to New York to recover the stolen car and money.

A vagabond calling himself Pastor John boards the boxcar while Emmett is absent and attacks Billy, wrestling away his collection of silver dollars.

A veteran named Ulysses forces Pastor John off the moving train and stays with Billy until Emmett returns.

Duchess sneaks into Warden Ackerly's home in South Bend and strikes the sleeping man in the skull with a cast-iron skillet, leaving him for dead.

Fitzy tells Emmett the truth: Duchess's father planted a dead man's stolen watch on his own son and had Fitzy sign a false witness statement.

Duchess slips a drug into Emmett's drink at the circus and has him locked inside the brothel upstairs, abandoning him a second time.

Duchess, Woolly, and Billy find Professor Abacus Abernathe working in his Empire State Building office.

Dennis privately scolds Woolly for the dinner party and declares that after finishing his sentence at Salina, Woolly will work on Wall Street rather than attend college.

Woolly arranges his belongings beside his bed at the Wolcott family camp and takes a fatal overdose of his own medication and Sarah's prescription pills.

Billy steps out of hiding to reveal the rifles are useless because Duchess cannot read the house-closing rules requiring all firing pins to be removed.

Emmett places the unconscious Duchess in a leaking boat with his share of the money; Duchess drowns when he lunges for bills blowing across the water and capsizes the craft.

Emmett Watson returns home from Salina juvenile detention to find the family farm repossessed and his brother Billy determined to follow their mother's trail to San Francisco. Before they can leave, Emmett's fellow inmates Duchess and Woolly hijack his car and his cash, forcing Emmett and Billy to stow away on a freight train headed east. Their pursuit through New York City is constantly derailed by Duchess's scheming, including a brutal assault on their former warden and Emmett being drugged and abandoned twice. The brothers finally converge on the Wolcott family camp in the Adirondacks, where Woolly has died by suicide and Duchess holds them at gunpoint. Billy's sharp observation and Emmett's resolve bring the confrontation to its end, and Emmett engineers a fate for Duchess that fulfills his promise to his brother while settling every debt.

The headline events driving Emmett and Billy's ten-day journey from Nebraska to New York and back.

Emmett signs over the Watson farm to the bank and learns from Mr. Ransom that some townspeople still hold Jimmy Snyder's death against him.

Emmett deliberately walks past the fairgrounds where Jimmy Snyder died rather than taking a route that would let him avoid the site.

Emmett consults almanacs at the Morgen library and decides California's faster population growth makes it a better market than Texas for his carpentry business.

Duchess follows one of Jake Snyder's companions behind the courthouse and hits him across the head with a board to balance accounts on Emmett's behalf.

Woolly and Billy bond at the Watson farmhouse, and Woolly describes how Salina's rigid daily schedule makes every single day feel exactly the same.

Duchess searches Emmett's clothes for the car keys late at night; Sally arrives unexpectedly and leaves a shoebox of preserves on the porch with Duchess's name on the lid.

Alone in the boxcar with his mother's postcards, Emmett recalls her worsening depression after Billy's birth and the morning he woke to find her gone.

Ulysses tells Billy how he enlisted against his wife's wishes, returned from Italy to find her gone, and has spent eight years riding freight trains across the country.

Woolly drives the Studebaker alone to a small-town square to admire an Abraham Lincoln statue and parks illegally in front of a fire hydrant with the engine running.

Duchess visits Townhouse in Harlem and asks him to deliver three punches to clear the debt owed since Townhouse was beaten after the rainy-night escape to see a John Wayne film.

Duchess impulsively tosses the keys to Emmett's Studebaker to Townhouse's associate Maurice, giving the car away on the spot.

Ulysses guides the Watson brothers to the hobo encampment and Emmett discovers that the bill Mr. Parker slipped him is a fifty-dollar note rather than the five he assumed.

Sally confronts her father about how quickly he purchased the Watson farm; he responds by calling her willful and unsuited to matrimony, severing the last of her loyalty to him.

Woolly gives Billy his grandfather's solid-black military wristwatch and explains that it must be wound exactly fourteen times to keep perfect time.

Ulysses and Professor Abernathe board a westbound boxcar together, setting out on Ulysses's journey back toward his wife and son.

While Emmett focuses on getting himself and Billy to California, the secondary events of the novel flesh out each character's inner world and shifting loyalties. Emmett's deliberate visit to the site of Jimmy Snyder's death, his research into California's housing market, and the late-night departure of the Studebaker all reveal the pressures closing in on him before he even leaves Nebraska. On the road and in New York City, Duchess settles accounts in increasingly reckless ways, from delivering a board across a stranger's head to surrendering Emmett's car on impulse, while Woolly's fragile independence is exposed when he drives the Studebaker alone to admire a Lincoln statue. Sally's confrontation with her father and her discovery that Emmett failed to call mark the moment she decides her future lies elsewhere. The pool closes with Ulysses and Professor Abernathe boarding a westbound boxcar together, each man finally pointed toward a destination of his own.

The significant supporting moments that shape each character's choices across the ten days.

Emmett opens the Studebaker's trunk and finds his father's letter alongside a torn page from Emerson's Essays and three thousand dollars in cash left as a blessing for his future.

Jake Snyder and two companions corner Emmett outside the Morgen library and Emmett absorbs several punches without retaliating once.

Sheriff Petersen tells Emmett that refusing ever to fight back is admirable but will leave him unable to protect himself or his brother in the long run.

Sister Agnes reveals that Duchess's father abandoned him at the St. Nicholas's orphanage for two years and asks Emmett to show Duchess charity when he finds him in New York.

Sally overrules Emmett's plan to leave Billy in Nebraska and insists the boy belongs at his brother's side for the journey east.

Emmett tells Billy the true story of the rainy-night escape, explaining how Duchess turned back early and let Townhouse face eight lashes alone for his absence.

Emmett climbs across the rooftops of moving boxcars to find food in a private Pullman car and barely scrambles back to safety as the train rounds a sharp curve.

Duchess arrives at the Sunshine Hotel and finds his father has fled; the only thing left behind in room forty-two is the Othello prop box Harrison valued above everything else.

Duchess corners Fitzy at the Anchor bar and extracts Harrison Hewett's location in Syracuse by making clear that failure to cooperate will have painful consequences.

Townhouse arranges for the Gonzalez twins to repaint the Studebaker and significantly upgrade its engine so police tracking Duchess's car will not connect it to Emmett.

Woolly promises Sarah he will return to Salina, then immediately deflects her follow-up worry by suggesting they have tea at the Plaza Hotel as they used to with their grandmother.

Professor Abernathe tells Ulysses that carrying a railroad spike to a place where no one recognizes it and hammering it into the ground is the act of tribute that will allow him to return home.

Emmett realizes from Sheriff Petersen's visit to Sally that Duchess is headed to harm his father, and Billy spots the Wolcott camp already marked on the Studebaker's road map.

Emmett arrives at the Wolcott camp to find Woolly dead in his bedroom and Duchess still attacking the locked safe with an axe in the study below.

Billy opens the safe to reveal $150,000 in cash and a note from Woolly dividing his trust fund equally among Emmett, Billy, and Duchess.

The Lincoln Highway turns on moments of revelation that alter what every character believes is possible. Emmett's father's letter reframes his entire understanding of Charlie Watson's choices, while Sheriff Petersen's warning and Sister Agnes's plea complicate how Emmett decides to handle Duchess throughout the journey. On the train east, Emmett's confession to Billy about Townhouse and the Hondo escape is the first honest reckoning with Duchess's pattern of harm. In New York, Duchess's discovery of his father's flight and his coercion of Fitzy confirm that the trip was never just about Woolly's money. The pool turns toward resolution when Emmett pieces together Duchess's plan from Sally's news and Billy pinpoints the camp on the map, leading to the final confrontation where Billy's reading of the safe combination and the house-closing rules bring the entire journey to its close.

The key discoveries, decisions, and emotional shifts that redefine each character's path.