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.