A novella-sized work of historical fiction originally published in the 1870s as a dime novel and then re-published in 1908 as a nickel weekly, The Mountain Demon: An Indian Tale of Thrilling Interest is number 16 of the beloved Beadle's Frontier Series which featured halfway decent writing incorporating halfway reliable history, while also being a tad longer than most nickel weeklies. This particular issue is a story about the long-term consequences of a bloody Apache raid on and murder of a group of white settlers.
One survivor who has lost his wife and two children, becomes so enraged at the Indians' perfidy and cruelty that he embarks upon a course of revenge of many years' duration, earning him the superstitious fear of his Indian enemies who come to consider him a demon. Meanwhile, unknown to him and unknown to each other, both of his children actually survived, and the story herein begins when they are both adults and all three of them become involved in the same exciting events.
At more than 29,000 words, this work of fiction, besides being an interesting and fun read, gives the reader a taste of what the masses were reading in the late 19th and early 20th century time period.
Preparing old books (or, as in this case, weekly magazines) 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.
