This combined compendium summarizes the tale’s setting, principal actors, the sequence of violent and investigatory episodes, and the judicial resolution, emphasizing how frontier spectacle, jealous rivalries, and forensic tracking displace a threatening supernatural motif.

Setting and principal figures
Action centers on Casa del Corvo, an isolated hacienda on the Leona near Fort Inge in unsettled southwestern Texas. Principal persons are Louise Poindexter and her brother Henry; Maurice Gerald, an Irish mustanger; Cassius Calhoun, a jealous cousin; Doña Isidora Covarubio de los Llanos, a proud Mexican heiress; Miguel Diaz (“El Coyote”), a villainous mustanger; Zeb Stump, an expert tracker; and Phelim, Maurice’s groom. The Prologue frames events with the uncanny image of a “Headless Horseman” riding the plains, a recurring, terrify­ing motif.

Early incidents and the love triangle
The Poindexter caravan, lost on a burnt prairie, is guided to safety by Maurice, whose riding skill and self-possession win Louise’s secret admiration. Maurice captures a marked mare (the yegua pinta) and gives it to Louise, intensifying Cassius’s jealousy. A spectacular manada hunt and a subsequent tavern duel between Maurice and Cassius leave Calhoun wounded and hostility inflamed. Maurice and Louise pursue furtive courtship—arrowed messages and nocturnal meetings—while Isidora’s attentions complicate feelings and rumor.

Disappearance, headless apparitions, and investigation
Henry later disappears; his bloodied horse returns. Witnesses and Mexicans report sightings of a headless rider; Zeb Stump encounters such a rider, fires, and recovers material traces that suggest a human artifice rather than pure supernatural agency. Maurice is found gravely injured and immobilised after an altercation in the chapparal; his dog Tara and Zeb aid his rescue. Phelim’s comic signals and Isidora’s interventions further complicate events. A severed head preserved in a hat and other macabre finds deepen the mystery.

Trial, forensic linkage, and confession
A lynch-threat is arrested and a formal civil‑military trial convened beneath a live oak. Louise’s candid testimony about nocturnal meetings, together with Calhoun’s perjured evidence, inflames the crowd. Maurice gives an unsworn account explaining a reconciliation with Henry, his discovery of the body—beheaded and shot—and the accidental unhorsing that left him incapacitated. Zeb’s fieldwork produces decisive material evidence: a marked lead bullet and a scorched scrap bearing Captain Cassius Calhoun’s initials. Pursuit follows; Maurice lassoes and captures Calhoun. Faced with the evidence, Calhoun admits firing the fatal shot and decapitating the corpse; he then fires on Maurice and kills himself.

Aftermath and themes
Maurice survives, marries Louise, and settles at Casa del Corvo; Diaz is later apprehended and hanged. The headless rider endures as a local legend, its terror partly theatrical but never fully demystified. The outcome underscores the frontier’s volatile mix of honor, jealous vengeance, communal spectacle, and the decisive role of material evidence and tracking in resolving contested violence.