Then Orrin suddenly “emerged” from the forest into “an old road”, kind of like a grim fairy tale, then about a hundred metres in front of him, he sees the figure of a man standing “indistinctly” and “motionless” in the “gloom”. Orrin felt like he couldn’t do anything because “it was to late to retreat” and he felt like the first chance he got to turn around he would be shot in the back with a shotgun. Then the two men stood there, Orrin didn’t know what to do next so he stood there like a tree, motionless and he “nearly suffocated by the activity of his heart”. His heart was racing, this also adds tension because we don’t know what is going to happen next, and if we want to find out, then we have to read on to see who the man in the distance is, and what he’s going to do.
“A moment later – it may have been an hour”, it felt like time stood still while they were both standing there. Then moments later Orrin sees the man’s arm lift and point “towards and beyond him”. “He Understood”. Orrin turned back and did what the man had told him to because he knew time was up and he knew he was caught. Orrin turned and started walking in the direction the man told him to. He didn’t dare to breathe or look on either side of him, but he knew the man was behind him. He didn’t even dare to try to escape or run, because he knew he was caught and it was pointless, and if he did try to escape he thought he would be “filled with buckshot”. We read on to find out who the man is – “The visible embodiment of the law”.
In the fourth paragraph, Ambrose Bierce takes a break from telling the story; to tell us a little about what happens after this story takes place. Ambrose says “He was as courageous a criminal as ever lived to be hanged” so he did get hanged after-all. Ambrose Bierce does this on-purpose to add suspense. We still want to find out who the man is, so we read on.
The next paragraph follows on from the paragraph before the last one. It starts with Orrin being made to walk in front of his captor back towards the jail. We know Orrin was hanged eventually, but we want to read on to find out what happens next. He turned around to find the person who was making him walk was actually “Burton Duff, the jailer”. This adds another twist to the story making it over-all more interesting.
The last paragraph starts with them entering the town, going “straight” towards the jail. The end becomes the final twist. Orrin Brower enters the jail to find “half a dozen men” getting reading with weapons to hunt down Orrin Brower. This was the search. But this isn’t the biggest twist in the tale, on a table in the corridor he finds the dead body of Burton Duff, who had been killed by the blow to the head with the iron pole at the start of the story. We only find out that this is a ghost story, not a mystery or crime story on the very last line of the story. “And on the table in the corridor, lay the dead body of Burton Duff”.
Overall I think this is a good story, it has lots of twist, and it’s well written and well planned. My favourite thing about the story is the twist at the very end. It shows Ambrose Bierce does everything he can to create a suspense-filled and interesting story.
