Norman quickly lost any trace of his life with the Kiowa and grew up as a child of the Horton’s. After two years as an Army chaplain, Micah left his post and returned to the pulpit by returning to his native Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, near what is today Huntersville. The Rock Creek Methodist Church congregation was poor, mostly cotton mill workers and thus he too was paid mere subsistence. Young Norman started working in the mills when he was twelve to supplement the family’s income, although his father required him to continue his school work, hoping he would too want to be a minister.Norman’s millworker-world overtook others in which he lived, unbeknownst to his parents. By his mid teens he was regularly traveling to nearby Charlotte to play cards in small games in the back of beer halls, but maintained a quiet, sky front at home. His gambling income became steady enough that he quit his mill job and played cards full time as well as finishing high school a year early. His parents believed he was their good boy, Norman Bearfoot, working a night shift in a Charlotte mill, a place with a future. But in the backrooms of Charlotte’s working class bars he was known as Barefoot Norman, because of his youth, the boy with a golden hand.
In the fall of 1886, Norman’s life changed in a matter of days when his separate lives merged with awful consequences.