An Army Portia

First published in 1890, written by a former cavalryman who experienced Indian warfare on the western plains, this novel tells a story of romance and honor defended (in a court-martial) on a U.S. Army base somewhere west of the Mississippi in the late 1880s, a peaceful base from whence soldiers are rotated into and out of the various Indian war zones.  Charles King’s novels never fail to reveal the intimate knowledge he possessed of Army life in every particular, which, when added to his natural talent as a storyteller, makes for first-rate historical fiction.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.