Over the next week, Emmett rode down to the beach every day and swam in the ocean and ate Mexican food and explored Old Town San Diego, but he was eager to get back to his original plan, so he soon got packed and hit the road.
His plan was to head up the coast to Seattle on his brand-new motorcycle.
Which was not as free and easy as it sounds. This was before the construction of the Pacific Coast Highway, which would also be known as US 1, so the roads and byways along the way varied widely in quality and ease of passage. The trip took him several weeks, and by the time he crossed into Washington state, he was so beat up from the trip he couldn’t wait to sell the Indian.
Emmett had spent many a day driving cattle and many a night sleeping on the ground. He’d broken mustangs and even ridden a bull or two, but his tailbone had never ached as much as it did at the end of that long trek up the Pacific coast.
In spite of the rough ride, though, he’d kept the motorcycle in good shape, and he got almost as much as he’d paid for it brand new. Good old Bert Roosevelt.
Once he’d sold the motorcycle, Emmett enrolled in barber school just long enough to become reasonably proficient, not because he wanted to actually make a living at cutting hair but because if there was one thing the logging camps throughout the region needed, it was a good barber.
And if there was one thing the camps had in abundance, it was men with ready cash in their pockets.
Emmett had no trouble at all finding a logging camp with need of his services, and he quickly contracted with the general manager to set up shop.
The loggers worked long and hard all week, and by the time the weekend arrived, they were ready to cut loose and have a good time—maybe go into town and look for girls and play a little poker on their return. So, they all wanted haircuts on Friday night, which Emmett was happy to provide. He also got himself invited to their poker games.
His situation was the same as at the ranch, only this time, he didn’t actually have to work besides his barber duties, so he liked it a lot better.
Eventually, just like at the Mackey ranch, the men ran out of money to lose, and it was time once again to move on. Emmett packed up and headed to the next camp, where he cut more hair and siphoned up more wages. He kept this up until he’d basically cleaned out every logger in the Pacific Northwest, with none of them the wiser.
He figured eventually some of the loggers would either connect in town or exchange stories as they left one camp’s employ for another, so he was satisfied that he’d made all the money he could as a “barber,” at least for the time being.
Plus, there was that little promise he’d made to Carmen the day he left home over a year before.
Emmett went to the nearest town, found a Buick dealership, and told the salesman he wanted the sporty two-door Roadster in the middle of the showroom floor.
“Let’s go see what we have in stock,” the salesman said.
“Don’t bother with any of that,” Emmett told him. “I’ll take this one.”
“Actually, that one’s sold. Fella’s coming in this afternoon. But we have others ’round back.”
Emmett reached into his pocket, pulled out a wad of bills big enough to choke a logger, and fanned out several thousand dollars. “What time did you say that other fella’s comin’?”
The salesman looked down at the cash and then back up at Emmett. “What fella?”
Emmett just smiled.
Less than ten minutes later, he drove off the lot in his brand-new 1921 Buick Roadster with a canvas top and a fire-engine-red paint job that he knew his brothers would see from at least a half mile away as they hunkered down in the fields, picking cotton under the blazing southern sun.
He was smiling all the way back to Oklahoma.
Chapter 3
Emmett had enjoyed his adventures up and down the West Coast—especially all the money he’d made!—but the truth was that he’d gotten a little homesick, and he was ready to get back to Oklahoma to see his family. He was still just shy of his eighteenth birthday, after all. There was as much boy left in him as there was man, probably, in spite of the way he carried himself in the world.
But the eighteen-month trip had given him all the confidence in the world, and Emmett figured he could use that confidence back on familiar ground just as easily as he could out West. In a way, he felt like he’d traveled to the end of the world, and he was now convinced, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, that after seeing all that he could see, there really was no place like home.
He passed through the same towns and dusty rail junctions that he’d seen on the way out to California, only this time, it felt different. Emmett was moving at his own pace, not depending on some stranger who’d offered him a ride or some bus schedule that didn’t agree with him.
Now he was in charge, with no one at all to answer to, and he loved every minute of it. It felt right to be in control of his own destiny. When a man realizes he is in charge of the rest of his life, he wants the rest of his life to start as soon as possible.
Emmett couldn’t wait to get back home and make his fortune.
It seemed that trip made him the man he was, more determined than ever to be the master of his own fate. He’d left school at the age of nine, worked in the fields alongside his father and brothers to put food on the table, and never shied away from hard work, but all that he’d experienced after leaving home had told him that a future without such an arduous path was not only a possibility—for him, it was a necessity.
The man whose father had taught him from the age of ten how to build fences with cedar poles and barbed wire for any rancher who’d hire them was not the sort of man who would be penned in by any artificial boundary, man made or otherwise.
When he passed back through Benson, he briefly considered stopping in at the hotel where he’d played poker to see if there was a game going on, but somehow he didn’t think it would be the same if he pulled up in a brand-new convertible. And that’s when he realized it wasn’t just the money he loved; it was winning the money. He now understood fully what Decimer had taught him.
There’s no such thing as gambling; there’s only winning.
Once he’d passed through town, Emmett pulled off the side of the road to eat a sandwich he’d packed for the trip. He leaned back against the car and ate as a small group of cows gathered around a water hole a half mile away on the other side of a barbed-wire fence much like the fences he and his father and brothers had built on occasion for ranchers all across north Texas.
It was a well-built fence, with tightly strung wire and deep, solid posts. For all he knew, the land on the other side of that fence was actually part of Big John Mackey’s ranch. Maybe built by the ranch hands he’d played poker with over a year ago, men who worked for another man and might spend their entire lives beholden to the property of another.
Emmett didn’t want that for himself. If he’d learned anything on his Wild West adventure, it was that he needed to be his own boss.
He looked out over the flat expanse of pasture that stretched as far as he could see. He wanted to own land like that someday, to make a place where he could raise a family and where his relatives could gather. But those ranchers had it backward. They spent all week busting their backs working the land so they could relax and play poker once their work was done.
Emmett wanted to play poker all week so he could relax with his cattle after the gambling was done.
Years later, the land he was admiring in the distance would be purchased by another restless young man who’d been advised to go west: a fellow by the name of Jack Speiden, who turned the Jay Six Cattle Ranch into something of a gathering point for future politicians. A young John