No writer is better than Charles King at bringing the reader vividly and realistically into the life of a U. S. Army soldier during the late-19th-early-20th century. Because of his personal experience as an officer in the conflicts of that period, he not only gets the historical details correct, but also the settings, moods, and day-to-day life, including the personal, romantic, financial, and family life of the soldiers living on those far-flung military posts along the western frontier.
Published originally in 1886, Marion's Faith: A sequel to The Colonel's Daughter was Mr. King's attempt to capitalize on The Colonel's Daughter (1882), his first real commercial success. By re-introducing many of the same characters featured therein as featured characters herein—and introducing brand new beloved characters that go on to star in future books (I am thinking of Mr. Blake especially, who ends up as the titular character of his own novel), Mr. King makes us feel like we are part of a close-knit, Wild West, U. S. Army, cavalry family. The end result of all this character re-use is a series of novels in which the reader continually sees favorite characters in different circumstances, as though meeting old friends in new places.
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.
