Excerpt from The Boy Hunters of the Mississippi In 1846, after Mayne Reid had made the acquaintance of Edgar Allan Poe in Philadelphia, he went off as volum teer to the Mexican war, fought bravely at Santa Cruz, Cerro Gordo, and Contreras, and was reported dead after the taking of Chapultepec, in September 1847. A dirge to his memory was actually recited at a banquet in Ohio. His first novel, The Rifle Rangers, was written in America, and once he had found his measure as a tale-writer, he used his invention without stint. For a time he was almost as popular as Jules Verne. His enterprise led him into other schemes, including a daily London paper, The Little Times, which only ran for three or four days. But his courage was unabated to the end, whether he was fighting with his sword in open war, or with his pen in the cause of Kossuth or Edgar Poe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.