Oh, but what work that is! Those words and images, the well-told story, all that doesn't happen by itself. It takes sitting and staring at blank sheets of paper hour after hour, day after day, year after year.

And at 71, when he left to hang out with Pancho Villa and his army, Bierce had been chained to his writer's desk for over 40 years. Perhaps he simply tired of the effort needed to keep his readers reading. Maybe it was time to move on to something else, lark about a bit in Mexico.

Besides, his Collected Works, 12 volumes worth, published in 1912, a year before his disappearance, had met with less-than-enthusiastic praise. As one critic put it, "Bierce's vain and overwhelming desire for literary eminence had resulted in an imbalanced hodgepodge of writings..."*

So consider Bierce the writer, the totality of his life's work landing with a thud, what's he likely to do? Yes, he claimed he might want to write a few articles about his time with Villa's army then head on down to South America and finally to England.

Or in modern parlance, Bierce's disappearance was the ultimate career move. An ending worthy of a Trickster.

*Richard Saunders, Ambrose Bierce: The Making of a Misanthrope, 1985.
Other sources include Alfred Kazin in The American Short Story, Vol. 1 (1977)