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.