The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lone Ranche, by Captain Mayne Reid

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Title: The Lone Ranche

Author: Captain Mayne Reid

Release Date: April 27, 2007 [EBook #21240]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONE RANCHE ***

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

The Lone Ranche
A Tale of the Staked Plain

By Captain Mayne Reid
________________________________________________________________________
This was quite a hard book to transcribe, and I hope there are not now
too many errors remaining. For one thing several of the people of the
book speak a very rough version of the language, so that there are many
hundreds of "words" appearing in the book, that are not in the
dictionary. And the "new" words are not always consistently spelt.

There are numerous Spanish or Mexican words used in the book, but I
am no scholar in these tongues. I just did my best to get them right.

Another problem was that the type used to print the book had been
damaged in many places, which meant that it was sometimes very hard to
decipher. After much poring there remains only one damaged word in the
book, of which I am not certain.

As if this were not enough I made the mistake of scanning the book too
dark, which meant that in very many cases a full stop following the
letters `t' and sometimes `e' had not come correctly through the OCR
process; and also any stains on the pages obscured the letters under
them. This greatly increased the amount of work needed to transcribe
the book.

I suppose this is among the very first "cowboy and Indian" books. If
you are interested in this genre, here is the book for you. NH
________________________________________________________________________

THE LONE RANCHE
A TALE OF THE STAKED PLAIN

BY CAPTAIN MAYNE REID

CHAPTER ONE.

A TALE OF THE STAKED PLAIN.

"HATS OFF!"

Within the city of Chihuahua, metropolis of the northern provinces of
Mexico--for the most part built of mud--standing in the midst of vast
barren plains, o'ertopped by bold porphyritic mountains--plains with a
population sparse as their timber--in the old city of Chihuahua lies the