began a line of cross-questioning which suggested that Mrs. Small
had been guilty of a liaison with a Canadian officer who appeared in
the records merely as Mr. X. The widow, rising dramatically in court,
indignantly denied these imputations as well as the induced theory
that her misbehavior had led to an estrangement from her husband and,
perhaps, to his disappearance. The widow declared that this suspicion
was diametrically opposed to the truth, and that if Small were in
court he would be the first to reject it. As a matter of fact, she
testified, it was Small who had been guilty. He had confessed his fault
to her, promised to be done with the woman in the matter, and had been
forgiven. There had been a complete reconciliation, she said, and Small
had agreed that one half of the million-dollar check which he received
on the day of his disappearance should be hers.
To bear out her statements in this matter, Mrs. Small soon after
obtained permission of the court to file certain letters which had been
found among Small’s effects after his disappearance. In this manner
the secret love affair in the theater magnate’s last years came to be
spread upon the books. The letters presented by the wife had all come
from a certain married woman who, according to the testimony of her own
writings and of others who knew of the connection, had been associated
with Amby Small since 1915. It appears that Mrs. Small discovered the
attachment in 1918 and forced her husband to cause his inamorata to
leave Toronto. The letters, which need not be reprinted here, contained
only one significant strain.
A letter, which reached Small two or three days before he disappeared,
concluded thus: “Write me often, dear heart, for I just live for your
letters. God bless you, dearest.”
Three weeks earlier, evidently with reference to the impending close
of his big deal and his retirement from active business, the same lady
wrote: “I am the most unhappy girl in the world. I want you. Can’t
you suggest something after the first of December? You will be free,
practically. Let’s beat it away from our troubles.”
And five days later she amended this in another note: “Some day,
perhaps, if you want me, we can be together all the time. Let’s pray
for that time to come, when we can have each other legitimately.”
Mrs. Small declared that she had found these letters immediately after
her husband’s departure, and that they had kept her from turning the
case over to the police until two weeks after the disappearance.
Meantime the other woman had been summoned, interrogated by the police,
and released. She had not seen Small nor had she heard from him either
directly or indirectly. It was apparent that, while she had been
corresponding with Small up to the very week of his last appearance, he
had not gone to see her.
Finally the will contest was settled out of court, Small’s sisters
receiving four hundred thousand dollars, and the widow retaining the
balance.
And here the darkness closes in again. Even in the progress of the will
controversy no hint was given of the official or family beliefs as to
the mystery. There are only two tenable conclusions. Either there is
a further skeleton to be guarded, or the police have some kind of
information which promises the eventual solution of the case and the
apprehension of suspected criminals. How slender this promise must be,
every reader will judge for himself, remembering the years of fruitless
attack on this extraordinary and complex enigma.
XV
THE AMBROSE BIERCE IRONY
Some time in his middle career, Ambrose Bierce wrote three short tales
of vanishment--weird and supernatural things in one of his favorite
veins. The three sketches--for they are no more--he classed under the
heading, “Mysterious Disappearances,” a subject which occupied his
speculations from time to time. Herein lies a complete irony. Bierce
himself was later to disappear as mysteriously as any of his heroes.
No one will understand his story, with its many implications, or get
from it the full flavor of romance and sardonics without some brief
glance at the man and his history. Nor need one make apology for
intruding a short account of him in a story of mystery, for Bierce
alive was almost as strange and enigmatic a creature as Bierce dead.
Ambrose Bierce, whom a good many critics have regarded as the foremost
master of the American short story after Poe, was born in Ohio in
1841. He joined the Union armies as a private in 1861, when he was in
his twenty-first year, rose quickly through the ranks to the grade
of lieutenant, fought and was wounded at Chickamauga as a captain of
engineers under Thomas, and retired with the brevet rank of major.
After the war he took up writing for a living, and soon went to London,
where his early short stories, sketches and criticisms attracted
attention. His cutting wit and ironic spirit soon won him the popular
name “Bitter Bierce.”
After 1870, the banished Empress Eugénie of France, alarmed at the
escape of her implacable journalistic enemy, Henri Rochette, and the
impending revival in London of his paper, _La Lanterne_, in which she
had been intolerably lampooned, sought to forestall the French writer
by establishing an English paper called _The Lantern_, thus taking
advantage of the law which forbade a duplication of titles. For this
purpose she employed Bierce, purely on his polemical reputation, and
Bierce straightway began the publication of _The Lantern_, and devoted
his most vitriolic explosions to the baffled Rochette, who saw that he
could not succeed in England without the name which he had made famous
at the head of his paper and could not return to France, whence he was
a political exile.
In this employment Bierce exhibited one of his peculiarities. His
assaults on her old enemy greatly pleased the banished empress, and she
finally sent for Bierce. Following the imperial etiquette, which she
still sought to maintain, she “commanded” his presence. Bierce, who
understood and obeyed military commands, did not like that manner of
wording an invitation from a dethroned empress. He did not attend and
_The Lantern_ soon disappeared from the scene of politics and letters.
Bierce returned to America and went to San Francisco, where he in time
became the “dean of Western writers.” His journalistic work in San
Francisco and later in Washington set him apart as a satirist of the
bitterest strain. His literary productions marked him as a man of the
most independent thought and distinctive taste. Most of his tales are
Poe plus sulphur. He reveled in the mysterious, the dark, the terrible
and the bizarre.
Between intervals of writing his tales, criticisms and epigrams, Bierce
found time to manage ranches and mining properties, to fight bad men
and frontier highwaymen, to grill politicians, and to write verse.
Bierce went through life seeking combat, weathering storm after storm,
by some regarded as the foremost American literary man of his time,
by others denounced as a brute, a pedant, even as a scoundrel. In the
West he was generally lionized, in the East neglected. One man called
him the last of the satirists, another considered him a strutting
dunce. Bierce contributed to the confusion by making something of a
riddle of himself. He loved mystery and indirection. He liked the
fabulous stories which grew up about him and encouraged them by his
own silence and air of concealment. In the essentials, however, he was
no more than an intelligent and perspicacious man of high talent, who
hated sentiment, reveled in the assault on popular prejudices, liked
nothing so much as to throw himself upon the clay idols of the day with
ferocious claws, and yet had a tender and humble heart.
Toward the end of 1913, Mexico was in another of its torments. The
visionary Madero had been assassinated. Huerta was in the dictator’s
chair, Wilson had inaugurated his “watchful waiting,” and the new
rebels were moving in the north--Carranza and Villa. At the time
Ambrose Bierce was living, more or less retired, in Washington,
probably convinced that he had had his last fling, for he was already
past seventy-two and “not so spry as he once had been.” But along came
the order for the mobilization along the border. General Funston and
his little army took up the patrol along the Rio Grande, the newspapers
began to hint at a possible invasion of Mexico, and there was a stir of
martial blood among the many.
Some say that when age comes on, a man’s youth is born again.
Everything that belonged to the dawn becomes hallowed in the sunset of
manhood. It must have been so with Bierce. Old and probably more infirm
than he fancied, long written out, ready for sleep, the trumpets of
Shiloh and Chickamauga, rusty and silent for fifty years, called him
out again and he set out for Mexico, saying little to any one about
his plans or intentions. Some believed that he was going down to the
Rio Grande as a correspondent. Others said he planned to join the
Constitutionalists as a military adviser. Either might have been true,
for Bierce was as good an officer as a writer. He knew both games from
the roots up.
Even the preliminary movements of the man are a little hazy, but
apparently he went first to his old home in California and then down
to the border. He did not stop there, for in the fall of 1913 he was
reported to have crossed into Mexico, and in January his secretary
in Washington, Miss Carrie Christianson, received a letter from him
postmarked in Chihuahua.
Then followed a long silence. Miss Christianson expected to hear
again within a month. When no letter came, she wondered, but was not
alarmed. Bierce was a man of irregular habits. He was down there in a
war-torn country, moving about in the wilderness with armies and bands
of insurgents; he might not be able to get a letter through the
lines. There was no reason to feel special apprehension. In September,
1914, however, Bierce’s daughter, Mrs. H. D. Cowden of Bloomington,
Illinois, decided that something must be amiss, no word having come
from her father in eight months. She appealed to the State Department
at Washington, saying that she feared for his life.
[Illustration: ~~ AMBROSE BIERCE ~~]
The Department quickly notified the American chargé d’affaires in
Mexico to make inquiries and the War Department shortly afterwards
instructed General Funston to send word along his lines and to
communicate with the Mexican commanders opposite him, asking for
Bierce. The Washington officials soon notified Mrs. Cowden that a
search was being made. General Funston also answered that he was
proceeding with an inquiry. Again some months elapsed. Finally both the
diplomatic and the military forces reported that they had been unable
to find Bierce or any trace of him. Probably, it was added, he was with
one of the independent rebel commands in the mountains and out of touch
with the border or the main forces of the Constitutionalists.
Now the rumoring began. First came the report that Bierce had really
gone to Mexico to join Villa, whose reputation as a guerrilla fighter
had attracted the veteran, and whose emissaries were said to have
asked Bierce to join the so-called bandit as a military aide. Bierce,
it was reported, had joined Villa and had been with that commander in
Chihuahua just before the battle there, in which the rebel forces were
unsuccessful. Possibly Bierce had fallen in action. This story was soon
discarded on the ground that Villa, had Bierce been on his staff,
would certainly have reported the death of so widely-known a man and
one so close to himself.
A little later came a second report, this time backed by what seemed
to be more credible evidence. It was said that Bierce had been at the
later battle of Torreon in command of the Villista artillery, that he
had taken part in the running campaign through the province of Sonora
and that he had probably died of hardships and exposure in those trying
days.
A California friend now came forward with the report of a talk with
Bierce, said to have been held just before the author set out for
Mexico. The old satirist was reported to have said that he had grown
weary of the stodgy life of literature and journalism, that he wanted
to wind up his career with some more glorious end than death in bed and
that he had decided to go down into Mexico and find a “soldier’s grave
or crawl off into some cave and die like a free beast.”
It sounded very rebellious and Byronic, but Bierce’s other friends
immediately declared that it was entirely out of character. Bierce had
gone to Mexico to fight and see another war. He had not gone to die. He
was a fatalist. He would take whatever came, but he would not go out
and seek a conclusion.
So the talk went on and the months went by. There were no scare
headlines in the papers. After all, Bierce was only a distinguished man
of letters.
But there was a still better reason for the lack of attention. The
absence of Bierce had not yet been reported officially when the vast
black cloud of war rolled up in Europe. All men’s eyes were turned to
the Atlantic and the fields of Flanders. The American adventure along
the Mexican border seemed trivial and grotesque. The little puff of
wind in the South was forgotten before the menacing tornado in the
East. What did a poet matter when the armies of the great powers were
caught in their bloody embrace?
Yet Bierce was not altogether forgotten. In April, 1915, more than a
year after his last letter from Chihuahua, another note, supposedly
from him, was received by his daughter. It said that Major Bierce was
in England on Lord Kitchener’s staff and that he was taking a prominent
part in the recruiting movement in Britain. This sensation lasted ten
days. Then, inquiry having been made of the British War Office, the
sober report was issued that Bierce’s name did not appear on the rolls
and that he certainly was not attached to Lord Kitchener’s staff.
Now, at last, the missing writer’s secretary put the touch of disaster
to the fable. Miss Christianson announced in Washington that careful
investigation abroad showed that Major Bierce was not fighting with the
Allies, and that she and his family had been forced to the melancholy
conclusion that he was dead.
But how and where? The State Department continued its inquiries in
Mexico, but many private individuals also began to investigate.
Journalists at the southern front tried to get trace or rumor of the
man. Old friends went into the troubled region to seek what they could
find. The literary world was touched both with curiosity and grief and
with a romantic interest in the man’s fate. Bierce became a later
Byron, and it was held he had gone forth to fight for the oppressed and
found himself another Missolonghi.
Out of all this grew a vast curiosity. Probably Bierce was dead, though
even this was by no means certain. There was no evidence save the fact
that he had not written for more than a year, which, in view of the
man’s character and the situation in which he was caught, might be
no evidence at all. But, granting that he was dead, how had his end
come? Where was his body? It was impossible to escape the impression
that one whose life had been touched with such extraordinary color
should have died without a flame. The men and women who knew and loved
Bierce--and they were a considerable number--kept saying over and over
to themselves that this heroic fellow could not have passed out without
some signal. Surely some one had seen him die and could tell of his end
and place of repose. So the quest began again.
For years, there was no fruit. Northern Mexico, where Bierce had
certainly met his end, if indeed, he was dead, was no place for a
hunter after bits of literary history to go wandering in. First there
was the constant fighting between Huerta and the Constitutionalists.
Then Huerta was eliminated and Carranza became president. There
followed the various campaigns of pacification. Next Villa rebelled
against his old ally, leading to a fresh going to and fro of armies.
Finally the whole region was infested by marauding bands of irregular
and rebellious militia, part soldiers and part bandits. To cap the
climax came the invasion of Mexico by the expedition under Pershing.
In 1918 was heard the first report on Bierce which seemed to have some
basis in fact. A traveler had heard in Mexico City and at several
points along the railroad that an aged American, who was supposed to
have been fighting with either Villa or Carranza, had been executed by
order of a field commander. From descriptions, this man was supposed
to have been Bierce. At any rate, he might have been Bierce as well as
another, and, since Bierce was both conspicuous and missing, there was
some reason for credence. But no one could get any details or give the
scene of the execution. The report was finally discarded as no more
reliable than several others.
Another year went by. In February, 1919, however, came a report which
carries some of the marks of credibility.
One of the several persons who set out to clear up the Bierce enigma
was Mr. George F. Weeks, an old friend and close associate of the old
writer’s, who went to Mexico City and later visited the various towns
in northern Mexico where Bierce was supposed to have been seen shortly
before his death. Weeks went up and down and across northern Mexico
without finding anything definite. Then he returned to Mexico City and
by chance encountered a Mexican officer who had been with Villa in his
campaigns and had known Bierce well. Weeks mentioned Bierce to this
soldier and was told this story:
Bierce actually did join the Villista forces soon after January, 1914,
when he wrote his last letter from Chihuahua. He said to those who were
not supposed to know his affairs too intimately that he, like other
American journalists and writers, had gone to Mexico to get material
for a book on conditions in that unhappy country. In reality, however,
he was acting as adviser and military observer with Villa, though not
attached to the eminent guerilla in person. The Mexican officer related
that Bierce could speak hardly any Spanish and Villa’s staff hardly any
English. On the other hand, this particular man spoke English fluently.
Naturally, he and Bierce had been thrown together a great deal and had
held numerous conversations. So much for showing that he had known
Bierce well, and how and why.
After Chihuahua, the officer continued, he and Bierce had parted
company, due to the exigencies of military affairs, and he had never
seen the American alive again. He had often wondered about him and had
made inquiries from time to time as he encountered various commandos
of the Constitutionalist army. Finally, about a year later, which is
to say some time toward the end of 1915, the relating officer met a
Mexican army surgeon, who also had been with Villa, and this surgeon
had told him a tale.
Soon after the breach between Villa and Carranza in 1915, a small
detachment of Carranza troops occupied the village of Icamole, east of
Chihuahua State in the direction of Monterey and Saltillo. The Villista
forces in that quarter, commanded by General Tomas Urbina, one of the
most ruthless of all the Villa subcommanders, who was himself later put
to death, were encamped not far from Icamole, attempting to beleaguer
the town or, at least, to cut the Carranza garrison off from its base
of supplies and the main command. Neither side was strong enough to
risk an engagement and the whole thing settled down into a waiting and
sniping campaign.
In the gray of one oppressive morning toward the end of 1915, according
to the surgeon who was with Urbina, one of that commander’s scouts
gave an alarm, having seen four mules and two men on the horizon,
making toward Icamole. A mounted detachment was at once sent out and
the strangers were brought in. They turned out to be an American of
advanced years but military bearing, a nondescript Mexican, and four
mules laden with the parts of a machine gun and a large quantity of its
ammunition.
Both men were immediately taken before General Urbina, according to the
surgeon’s story, and subjected to questioning. The Mexican said that
he had been employed by another Mexican, whose name he did not know,
to conduct the American and his convoy to Icamole and the Carranza
commander. Urbina turned to the American and started to question him,
but found that the man could speak hardly any Spanish and was therefore
unable to explain his actions or to defend himself.
It may be as well to note the first objections to the credibility of
the story here. Bierce had been in Mexico almost two years, according
to these dates. He was a man of the keenest intelligence and the
quickest perceptions. He had also lived in California for many years,
where Spanish names are common and Spanish is spoken by many. It
seems hard to believe that such a man could have survived to the end
of 1915 in such ignorance of the speech of the Mexican people as to
be unable to explain what he was doing or to tell his name and who
he was. It seems hard to believe, also, that Bierce would have been
doing any gun-running or that he could have been alive twenty months
after the Chihuahua letter without communicating with some one in the
United States, without being found or heard of by the military and
diplomatic agents who had then already been seeking him for more than
a year. Also, it is necessary to explain how the man who went down to
fight with Villa happened suddenly to be taking a gun and ammunition
to Villa’s enemies, though this might be reconciled on the theory that
Bierce had gone to fight with the Constitutionalists and had remained
with them when Villa rebelled. But we may disregard these minor
discrepancies as possibly capable of reconciliation or correction, and
proceed further with the surgeon’s story.
Urbina, after questioning the captives for a little while, lost
patience, concluded that they must be enemies at best and took no half
measures. Life was cheap in northern Mexico in those days, judgments
were swift and harsh, and Urbina was savage by nature. He took away the
lives of these two with a wave of the hand. Immediate execution was
their fate.
Ambrose Bierce and the unknown Mexican were led out and placed against
the wall of a building, in this case a stable. Faced with the terrible
sight, the Mexican fell to his knees and began to pray, refusing to
rise and face his executioners. Bierce, following the example of his
companion, also knelt but did not pray. Instead, he refused the cloth
over his eyes and asked the soldiers not to mutilate his face. And so
he died.
“I was much interested in the whole affair,” the nameless Mexican
officer told Mr. Weeks, “and I asked my surgeon friend many questions.
He did not know Bierce at all and did not know he was describing the
death of some one in whom I was deeply concerned. But I had known
Bierce well and asked the surgeon for detail after detail of the
murdered American’s appearance, age, bearing, and manner. From what he
told me, I have not the slightest doubt that this was Ambrose Bierce
and that he died in this manner at the hands of the butcher, Urbina.”
Following the reports of Mr. Weeks, the San Francisco _Bulletin_ sent
one of its special writers, Mr. U. H. Wilkins, down into Mexico, to
further examine and confirm or discredit the report of the Mexican
officer. Mr. Wilkins reported in March, 1920, confirming the Weeks
report and adding what seems to be direct testimony. Mr. Wilkins says
that he found a Mexican soldier who had been in Urbina’s command at
Icamole and who was a member of the firing squad. This man showed Mr.
Wilkins a picture of Bierce which, he said, he had taken from the
pocket of the dead man just after the execution had taken place.
Still the doubt perseveres. No one has been able to find the grave of
Bierce. The picture which the soldier said he took from the pocket of
the dead man was not produced and has never, so far as I can discover,
been shown.