I really enjoyed this story. As you may know, this short story was the basis for all the Zorro movies that have been made in the past 90+ years. I think there have been 11 Zorro movies made in the US and many more made by European and Mexican film companies.

As is frequently the case when Hollywood makes films based on a book, the book is very different than any of the Zorro movies I have seen. It’s a far more interesting read than the movies and keeps you in suspense until the very end.

There were a few things that may have some readers scratching their heads:

1. McCulley used several Spanish words in the text. A few that I remember are: Fray is an abbreviation of fraile (monk or brother in a monastic order); frailes (plural of fraile); carcel is jail; carreta is cart.
2. There are numerous words and punctuation marks in the text that don’t make sense in the context. These are either type setting errors in the original or errors introduced by the software which scanned the original to make the eBook. I have seen this in my own documents when transcribed by software. For example, where I wrote “modern”, the software thought it was “modem”.

Some malapropisms that I remember are: bunked instead of blinked, hie and die for the. When you encounter an English word that seem odd or out of place, just use your imagination and think what it might have been.