Though Vincent Starrett[12] records that Villa flew into a rage when questioned about Bierce, a reaction looked upon by some as confirming Villa’s guilt, others have pointed out objections that seem insuperable. The break between Carranza and Villa did not follow until a long time after the battle of Chihuahua, they point out, and Bierce must have been alive all the while without writing a letter or sending a word of news to anyone. Possible but improbable, is the verdict of those who knew him most intimately.
[12] “Ambrose Bierce,” by V. Starrett.
So, applying the critical acid to the whole affair, there is still the mystery, as dark as in the beginning. We may have our delight with the dramatic or poetic accounts of his end if that be our taste, but really we are no closer to any satisfactory solution than we were in 1914.
Bierce is dead, past doubt. That much needs no additional proof. His fierce spirit has traveled. His bitter pen will scrawl no more denunciations across the page; neither will he sit in his study weaving mysteries and ironies for the delectation of those who love abstraction as beauty, and doubt as something better than truth.
My own guess is that he started out to fight battles and shoulder hardships as he had done when a boy, somehow believing that a tough spirit would carry him through. Wounded or stricken with disease, he probably lay down in some pesthouse of a hospital, some troop train filled with other stricken men; or he may have crawled off to some water hole and died, with nothing more articulate than the winds and stars for witness.
XVI
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CENTURY
No account of disappearances under curious and romantic circumstances, or of the enigmatic fates of forthfaring men in our times, would approach completeness without some narration of one of the boldest and maddest projects ever undertaken by human beings, in many ways the crowning adventure of the nineteenth century. Particularly now, when a circumnavigation of the earth by airplane has been accomplished, when the Atlantic has been bridged by a dirigible flight, and men have flown over the North Pole in plane and airship, the heroic and pathetic story of Doctor Andrée and his attempt to reach the top of the world by balloon is of fresh and abiding interest.
No one who was not alive in the late nineties of the last century and of age to read and be thrilled, can have any conception of the wonder and excitement this man and his voyage caused, of the cloud of doubt and mystery which hung about his still unexplained end, of the rumors and tales that came out of the North year after year, of the expeditions that started out to solve the riddle, of the whole decade of slowly abating preoccupation with the terrible romance of this singular man and his undiscoverable end.
In the summer of 1895, at the International Geographical Congress in London, Doctor Salomon August Andrée, a noted engineer, and chief examiner of the Royal Swedish Patent Office in Stockholm, let it be known that he was planning for a flight to the pole in a balloon, and that active preparations were under way. At first the public regarded the whole thing with an interested incredulity, though geographers, meteorologists, geodesists, and some students of aëronautics had been discussing the possibilities of such a voyage for much longer than a generation, and many had expressed the belief in its feasibility. Sivel and Silbermann, of the University of Paris, had declared as early as 1870 that this was the practical way of attaining the pole.