The Headless Horseman: A Strange Tale of Texas
1866
On the Texas frontier after the Mexican-American War, where Comanche raids terrorize new settlers and blood-guilt stains the land, a young man is murdered and a specter rides at dusk. The beautiful Louise Poindexter arrives at her family's plantation to find herself caught between two men: the scheming, dangerous Cassius Calhoun and the penniless but magnetic mustanger Maurice Gerald. When her brother Henry is found dead, all evidence points to Maurice as the killer. But on the lonely prairie, a headless horseman rides through the darkness, is it the ghost of Henry demanding revenge, or something far more sinister? Mayne Reid, the "Scott of the West," weaves frontier adventure, romantic intrigue, and Gothic terror into one electrifying tale that helped invent American Western fiction. This is Texas Gothic at its most audacious, where justice and vengeance become indistinguishable and the true monster may not be the one seen in the moonlight.
