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.
Therein lies the secret of Mr. King's novels: the romances and emotional entanglements of life on a 19th-century military base in the Wild West are the main focus of his stories, even in the midst of the various Indian wars and outbreaks which inevitably intruded upon those affairs, and which to the historian no doubt seem more important. Much longer than his usual works of fiction, Captain Blake sees the reappearance of a character from a previous novel, brought back at the request of readers, and over the course of a number of years takes him through a series of emotionally complicated private issues while at the same time, along with the rest of his fellow-soldiers, he is dealing with Indian uprisings on America's western frontier.
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.
