Dallas

Dallas is both a practical base for Jefferson Kyle Kidd’s work as a traveling news reader and a point of departure into danger. In the city he secures lodging and a theater, gathers printed and telegraphic news, and prepares handbills; beyond it, he takes a deliberate route to throw Almay and his Caddo companions off their trail. When he later passes through Dallas again, the city also marks a change in the life of Mrs. Gannet, who has chosen to remain there.

A Stop for Work and Lodging

After changing out of his traveling clothes and leaving them with Mrs. Gannet, Kidd rents two rooms in a hotel on Stemmons Ferry Road. The balloon-frame building has thin walls and curtains made from flowered grain sacks. Unsure how much his readings will earn, he nevertheless pays fifty cents for a bath, then sits in the hot water and shaves. The details make Dallas a temporary refuge, but not a settled home: his finances remain uncertain, and his stay is organized around the next performance.

Kidd books the small Broadway Playhouse for that night from its proprietor, whom he finds having an early drink in the Bluebonnet Saloon. To ensure the engagement will hold, he writes it down and gets the man’s signature in case the proprietor becomes too drunk to remember. The arrangement is characteristic of Kidd’s practical approach to travel: even a theater booking requires a safeguard against the instability around him.

Printing and the Flow of News

On Trinity, Kidd visits Thurber’s News and Printing Establishment. The hand-fed Chandler and Price press is producing announcements or advertisements, while type sticks, layout tables, and bindery equipment fill the shop. A wall sign identifies the place as a printing office and a crossroads of civilization. Kidd responds to the press’s physical presence—the ink, machinery, and pages in production—as a working system through which information becomes public.

He buys paper and an envelope, along with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, London Times, New-York Herald, and Mexico City’s El Clarion. His plan is to select articles from the English-language papers and translate material from El Clarion for his readings. He then goes to the Dallas Weekly Courier to receive news from the Associated Press wire. The line is operating from Arkansas and points east, although the Comanche and Kiowa have learned to disable telegraph wires by cutting and secretly repairing them with horsehair. Since Army orders also travel by wire, the network carries information and military power alike, yet remains vulnerable to interference.

At the Courier offices, Kidd takes a sheaf of printed notices and handbills from his portfolio and inks in their final line. Dallas thus joins the separate stages of his work: he obtains reports, chooses and translates articles, and prepares the printed material that will announce their public reading.

Departure and Evasion

When Kidd and Johanna leave Dallas at night, he chooses the Waxahachie Road rather than the Meridian Road, which Almay and his companions are likely to watch. He intends to turn west later and rejoin the Meridian route, hoping that the absence of fresh tracks will send the pursuers searching elsewhere and buy them three or four hours. Their departure makes Dallas more than a work stop: the surrounding roads are part of a tactical landscape in which route choice may determine whether they are caught.

Kidd aims to reach the country near the Brazos River before daylight and watch for pursuers from high ground. He expects the men may bribe a stable hand for information and judges that the man’s drinking makes him easy to influence. The plan is cautious rather than secure; Kidd is trying to gain time, not to believe the threat has passed.

Return Through the City

Later, after traveling through Texas with Johanna, Kidd passes through Dallas again and learns that Mrs. Gannet has taken up with a man considerably younger than he is. The man is sixty-two, wears thick glasses, and intends to stay in Dallas rather than wander. The contrast quietly recasts the city: for Kidd it has been a station on the road, but for Mrs. Gannet it is where a more settled life is taking shape.

Dallas’s recurring importance lies in this combination of infrastructure and transience. Its theater, presses, newspapers, telegraph office, and roads sustain Kidd’s itinerant occupation, while the city itself remains one stop within journeys that continue beyond it. The news he gathers there travels outward through his readings; he and Johanna, by contrast, leave by night and return only as their unsettled route brings them back.