The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Death Shot, by Mayne Reid

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Title: The Death Shot
A Story Retold

Author: Mayne Reid

Release Date: October 21, 2007 [EBook #23140]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEATH SHOT ***

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

The Death Shot, A Story Retold, by Captain Mayne Reid.

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This was quite a difficult book to transcribe. There were the usual
difficulties with this author--his frequent use of words in Spanish, or
the Mexican variety of Spanish, of words in French. In addition it must
have been something of an experimental writing, for it is generally in
the present tense, and there was frequent use made of new words that
have not survived in the language. Much, indeed almost all, of the
speech is uttered by uneducated persons, so that it needs perseverance,
sometimes, to make out what is being said. Probably most of the
speakers would not have been able to read, and would not have known how
to pronounce the words they uttered. Added to all that the
proof-reading, particularly towards the end of the book, left much to be
desired, quite common words having letters missing or all jumbled up.
Finally, the copy used was in a bad way, not from over-use, but from bad
binding. It fell apart completely, and we had to continue the work on a
scanner that can only read books that have been reduced to single pages.

We do not need to mention the problem usual with cheaply made books of
that period, that punctuation marks, especially commas and full-stops,
and especially at the corners of the pages, tend to disappear, and
some degree of cunning has to be brought to bear to recover them.

To illustrate the poor proof-reading, one of the chapters was completely
repeated, without any change in the flow of page numbers. This is
something I have never before seen, though I have seen chapters
completely omitted, without affecting the page-numbers!

All that having been said, I would like to think that the author would
have been pleased with our version, for certain it is that it is