Jiles uses dialogue in the same way as Kent Haruf, without quotation marks, which makes it more subtle, as if you just happened to hear it in passing. After I finished the book, I replayed it over in my mind, enjoying it again. As he and the girl grow closer, to each other and to their destination, he becomes more and more concerned about her future welfare. He thinks about how much his bones hurt and how, after fleeing danger, he needs more time now to recover, but he perseveres. The journey is hard on him, but he’s doing what he said he would do. He’s had a long and storied life, so this adds depth to the tale. He’s ethical, classy, tough and practical.

She was four at the time, and in the intervening six years she’s become more Kiowa than white. The young girl, Joanna, was kidnapped by Indians when they raided her farm and killed her family. News of the World is a narrow but exquisite book about the joys of freedom (experienced even by a raging river threatening to overrun its banks) the discovery of unexpected, proprietary love. I would have loved this story even if the person charged with bringing the ten-year-old back to her family had been a younger man, but you know I’m all about stories featuring oldsters. A celestial voice said, Well then, do it again.” The strange depression and spiritual chill he had felt back in Wichita Falls was gone. But now it was different and he was drawn back into the stream of being because there was once again a life in his hands. Who cares for your fashions and your wars and your causes? I will shortly be gone and I have seen many fashions come and go and many causes so passionately defended only to be forgotten. At the age he had attained with his life span short before him he had begun to look upon the human world with the indifference of a condemned man. “He thought, resentfully, I raised my girls. Now, as Captain Kidd travels with her, he begins to worry about what will happen at the end of her journey. A 71-year-old retired army captain in 1870, Texas, must return a 10-year-old girl, captured at age four by the Kiowa, to her relatives in San Antonio.

News of the world jiles