- Coalhouse emerges from the library. He is shot in the street by the police, who say he ran.
- The gang spreads out into New York. Younger Brother takes the car and drives all the way to Mexico. There he joins up with Pancho Villa and later Zapata. For a year he leads guerilla raids and grows deaf from the bombings. In a skirmish with government troops he is killed.
- Woodrow Wilson is now President. World War I is coming. The world is changing in art and science. J.P. Morgan notices it all as he travels Europe. He thinks the royal families are inbred and idiotic.
- Morgan continues to Egypt, looking for a place to build his very own pyramid. He is allowed to spend the night in one of the Great Pyramids at Giza by himself. During the night he dreams he is a peddler in ancient times. He awakens to bedbugs.
- Morgan leaves the Pyramids in the morning, passing by the Great Sphinx. The New York Giants baseball team are there on a world tour. John McGraw comes over to pay his respects. Morgan flees to his boat. Not long afterward, he dies, still convinced he'll be reincarnated.
- In Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Countess Sophie escape a bombing, only to both be assassinated by a young Serbian patriot. Back in America, Harry Houdini reads about it and remembers meeting the Archduke.
- After reading the paper, Houdini goes to Times Square, where he performs the trick of escaping from a straitjacket twelve stories in the air.
- While he is hanging upside down, Houdini remembers the image of a boy looking at himself in the brass headlamp of an automobile. This is the scene from the beginning of the book.
- We learn that Houdini might have gone back to the house in New Rochelle a week later because of this, but that no one was there.
- Mother and Father are barely speaking. Grandfather is dead. Younger Brother is dead. Father is spending much of his time in Washington D.C., selling the military inventions of Younger Brother to the Army and Navy. These include grenade launchers and flamethrowers, and other items that won't be used until World War II.
- Father believes America will get involved in the war soon. He is headed to London transporting grenades onboard the Lusitania when it's torpedoed, and he dies.
- Mother mourns for a year, and then marries Tateh. They move to California. There, Tateh is watching his dark-haired daughter, his blonde-haired stepson, and the black son of Sarah and Coalhouse Walker, when he gets an idea for a series of movies about a bunch of pals who have their own adventures together.
- The time of Ragtime is over. America has won the war. Emma Goldman has been deported. Evelyn Nesbit has lost her looks. And Harry K. Thaw is out of the insane asylum and marches in the Armistice Day parade.