Summary
The four boys begin their journey the next morning, headed towards Omaha to drop Duchess and Woolly off. On the way, Duchess asks Emmett to make a detour at his old orphanage. He goes in, promising to return in five minutes, but Emmett is eventually forced to track him down. He realizes that Duchess has given a jar of Sally’s strawberry preserves to the boys in the orphanage, and has locked the girls in their rooms. When he returns outside, Emmett finds his car missing and Billy sitting alone on the grass.
When questioned, Billy reassures Emmett that Duchess and Woolly have promised to return the car as soon as they return from New York. Without a car, Emmett calls Sally for help in watching over Billy while he tracks down Duchess and his car. Sally agrees to give them a ride to the train headed east, but tells Emmett that Billy has waited long enough for his brother and that the two should stay together. Emmett gives in once Billy declares that their journey must start in New York, at the start of the Lincoln Highway.
Headed to New York in Emmett's car, Duchess and Woolly listen to commercials on the radio. Duchess regales Woolly with a description of Leonello’s, an exceptional Italian restaurant that Duchess’s father worked at in the past. The car’s gas runs out and Duchess is forced to make a stop at a gas station. When he pulls over, he finds the envelope with 3,000 dollars that Emmett hid in the trunk.
Billy and Emmett plan to hitch a ride on a freight train, as they are out of money. Emmett tries to temper Billy’s growing hero worship of Duchess by revealing that Duchess was often the instigator of several rule-breaking incidents at Salina, including one instance with Townhouse, Emmett’s former bunkmate. Townhouse ended up badly beaten for Duchess’s trouble.
Emmett and Billy wait for the midnight train, and Billy shows the book he is reading to Emmett. It is a book of condensed adventure stories, written by Professor Abacus Abernathe from his office in the Empire State Building. Billy explains that he is planning to fill the blank You chapter of the book with their own story.
Duchess and Woolly check into a hotel for the night. Duchess shares that if he had 50,000 dollars, he would open his own Leonello’s. After Woolly is asleep, Duchess privately resolves to settle his unresolved debts: one that he has to pay, and two that he has to collect.
Having successfully boarded the train, Emmett reminisces on his mother and the night she left. An avid fan of fireworks, Emmett’s mother loved watching the Fourth of July display in a nearby town. After giving birth to Billy, however, she struggled with depression until that year’s Fourth of July celebration, when she seemed to come back to life. The next morning, she was gone.
Woolly and Duchess have breakfast the next morning, and Duchess makes conversation with a traveling salesman in the bathroom. Upon his return, he finds the car, Emmett’s Studebaker, missing along with Woolly, who has taken it to see a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Illinois.
Woolly, who has reached the statue of Abraham Lincoln, reminisces on his own family’s Fourth of July tradition, which involves a huge celebration and recitations. He comes from a particularly old and wealthy family in New England. He remembers when it was his turn as the youngest child turning ten to recite the Gettysburg Address, and how his family ended up joining him in his recitation when he faltered. Having seen the statue of Lincoln, Woolly turns back—and finds a police officer standing by Emmett’s car with a ticket pad.
On the train, Emmett goes in search of food for himself and his brother the next morning. He comes across a private train car with the remnants of a party from the night before, and salvages the leftover food. Before he can leave, he is drawn into conversation with the two wealthy occupants who are hungover and assume Emmett is a brakesman.
While Emmett is gone, Billy is approached by a stranger named Pastor John. Pastor John turns out to be dangerous and predatory, locking in on Billy’s coin collection to forcibly take and sell in New York. As Pastor John prepares to strike Billy for his bag, he is interrupted by the appearance of a stranger—a Black man named Ulysses. Ulysses saves Billy, threatening Pastor John into jumping off the moving train.
Left alone in their train car, Ulysses tells Billy that he will help him safely get off the train. Billy, enraptured by Ulysses’s appearance, asks whether he has fought in a war and left his wife and child behind, to which Ulysses is shaken and answers yes. Billy shares the story of Odysseus from his book of adventure with Ulysses, excitedly explaining the connection between the two.
Ulysses is forced to think about his past, as he is a veteran of World War II. Though not drafted, he eventually enlisted out of shame, leaving behind his pregnant wife. Upon his return, he found that neither his wife nor son had stayed, and since then he has been wandering throughout America, hopping trains.
Duchess, who has arrived in the nick of time, rescues Woolly from getting arrested for a parking violation by pretending to be a groundskeeper for his family. They get back in the car and continue their journey to New York, though Duchess makes a personal stop along the way.
The house he arrives at belongs to Ackerly, the previous warden at Salina whom Duchess hated for his racist and heavy-handed methods. He takes a cast-iron skillet from the kitchen and hits a slumbering Ackerly in the head with it. Then he leaves, satisfied that one of his three debts has been settled.
Emmett, having returned with food, settles in to sleep as Billy and Ulysses further bond over Billy’s book of stories. Troubled by Billy’s close call with Pastor John, Emmett contemplates the path that Duchess might have taken to New York to find his father.
Duchess arrives at the hotel where his father last stayed, but his room is occupied by a different gentleman. The old man gives Duchess a briefcase that was left behind by his father, which contains acting props for Othello, including a dagger and a jar of black face paint. Duchess rents two hotel rooms for the night, then bribes the front desk employee for information on his father’s whereabouts. The employee directs Duchess to a man named Fitzy FitzWilliams, who was close friends with Duchess’s father.
Having gotten his start as a vaudeville performer in between acts on stage, Fitzy enjoyed brief but significant success as a Walt Whitman and Santa Claus impersonator, until an ill-advised gig as Karl Marx ended his fame as quickly as it started. Now, he resides in the room across from Duchess and his father in the Sunshine Hotel.
Emmett, Billy, and Ulysses arrive in New York. As they have arrived in the evening, Ulysses leads them to a homeless camp for the night where they can sleep.
Analysis
The journey rapidly picks up once the boys leave Nebraska, though Emmett and Billy don’t get very far. Emmett’s plan to head to California is disrupted by Duchess and Woolly driving off with his car, a Studebaker that he paid for himself. Given his father’s recklessness with money and finances, Emmett is understandably more meticulous and steadfast in his approach, and he wants nothing to do with Duchess and Woolly’s risky plan. The motivations for each of the characters become clearer: Duchess wants to settle his debts before his fresh start, often in a violent way. Woolly cannot stand the monotony of Salina any longer, and pines for his childhood home. Emmett is determined to make a steadier future for himself and his younger brother than his father could, and must track down his missing car and money to do so. And Billy insists on finding their mother, eight years after she left without a word.
While Duchess and Woolly are not malicious in their intentions, they end up greatly inconveniencing Emmett, and he and his brother are forced to make the journey to New York by hopping a train. This is one of the moments where Emmett's relative inexperience hinders him: having spent his life only in Nebraska and Salina thus far, he does not know how to get to New York City. And Billy, while an impressively precocious and mature eight-year-old, is easily fooled by Duchess and Woolly into giving up Emmett's car. Ultimately, it is only with the help of a total stranger, a panhandler, that Emmett finds which train to take. The poor help each other.
On board the train, however, Emmett and Billy are once again lost. When Emmett leaves to find food for himself and his brother, Billy is victim to a predatory and avaricious "pastor". Pastor John's character is itself an instance of irony, as he claims to be a man of faith, yet goes around stealing from little children. The brief glimpse into his perspective reveals a humorously deluded way of thinking: Pastor John convinces himself that he was meant to help Billy sell his coin collection, which then turns into the belief that he was meant to 'relieve' Billy of his coin collection.
Billy’s book is held precious by him, and will continue to be an important symbol throughout the rest of the book. It is a collection of the stories of adventurers and travelers both fictional and historical, and fuels Billy’s fixation on following the Lincoln Highway to start their story. It is also the impetus for his friendship with Ulysses, as Billy connects with the veteran over his shared name with the Greek hero Odysseus. The blank chapter in the Abernathe book creates the perfect set-up for Billy to pursue his own adventure and travel, adding a layer of meta-analysis to the novel. On a literal level, Emmett and Billy are forced to track down their missing car and money when Duchess and Woolly take off with both. On a figurative level, the two brothers go off on an adventure that Billy will later record as a story.
Duchess tracks down the first of his unsettled debts: Ackerly, the ex-warden at Salina whom Duchess particularly disliked. The stakes rise sharply and violently when Duchess enacts his revenge by hitting the ex-warden in the head with a heavy skillet, causing significant injury. The next of his debts, Fitzy FitzWilliams, is less violent but equally ominous, as their conversation revolves around Duchess’s missing father who has run away to avoid his son. Fitzy’s fluctuating fortune as an actor shows the flightiness of luck, as mirrored by both Duchess's and Emmett’s fathers in different ways. Both chose risky occupations, and neither found much success, though they differed in their treatment of their sons. The failure that characters face from family is also a defining theme of the novel, as each of the four boys has a fraught relationship with their parents.
