Summary

It is eight o’clock, and time for Captain Kidd’s Dallas reading. Laying his watch across the podium and setting up his trademark bull’s eye lantern, Captain Kidd notes the two U.S. Arm men stationed at the front doors. The narrator explains that Texas is still under military rule, and has not yet been granted any seats in Washington. Since the North’s victory in the Civil War squashed the Southern Democrat party in Texas, the current election for governor is between two Union-loyal Republicans, who the narrator identifies only as “Davis” and “Hamilton.”

Shaking the pages of the London Times, Captain Kidd reads about British colonial census efforts in India, new meat packing plants in Chicago, a volcano eruption near Mexico City, and the boatloads of Irish pouring into New York City—basically, as the narrator puts it, “[a]nything...