The Lonesome Trail

"The Lonesome Trail" by John G. Neihardt is a collection of outsider stories, majorly about the Old West. Excerpt: "THE ALIEN THROUGH the quiet night, crystalline with the pervading spirit of the frost, under prairie skies of mystic purple pierced with the glass-like glinting of the stars, fled Antoine. Huge and hollow-sounding with the clatter of the pinto's hoofs hung the night above and about—lonesome, empty, bitter as the soul of him who fled. A weary age of flight since sunset; and now the midnight saw the thin-limbed, long-haired pony slowly losing his nerve, tottering, rasping in the throat. With pitiless spike-spurred heels the rider hurled the beast into the empty night."