Kitty’s Conquest

No writer is better than Charles King—at the point when this novel was published a captain, but eventually a general—at bringing the reader more vividly and realistically into the life of a U. S. Army soldier during the wars with the plains Indians of the American West.  Because of his personal experience of those wars, he not only gets the historical details correct, but also the settings, moods, and day-to-day life, including the personal, romantic, and family life of the soldiers living on those far-flung military posts along the western frontier.

In every novel he seems to add another aspect of those times that derives from his personal experience.  In this one, instead of King’s usual fare of describing the Indian wars of the Wild West, we are taken into the Deep South in the awkward years after the Civil War, when animosities were often still blatant, feelings still bitter, wounds still fresh, and the emotional re-constitution of the republic was proceeding fitfully and slowly.  Mr. King takes us into that period of time, into the midst of occupying forces from the North, and gives us a Romeo-and-Juliet type romance between an officer in blue and a stalwart partisan belle of the South just before the nation’s next conflict—with the plains Indians of the West—interrupts their lives with new dangers and separations.

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.