1989, I think, is when I first met Silver City’s David Toll. Initial impressions were scarce, but as time wove its divine course, his tales proved a rare solace in a world bereft of narrative grace.
Toll, I discovered, was a man of genuine merit.
That year, just before the snows laid claim to the Comstock in a blanket of thick white, Toll told about Jack Robinson, who old timers said showed up one day in 1915 and stayed until he passed a decade later. The man was the antisocial kind but had shared enough over the years to say he had fought in the Civil War and escaped from Pancho Villa.
“He’s buried somewhere in Virgin Alley up behind the slaughter house,” Toll said, “But no one knows where.”
Not until perusing the Internet and reading about Ambrose Bierce and his writing style did the article “My Hunt For Ambrose Bierce,” by Leon Day, appear. In the second chapter of the Day essay, “The Tex O’Reilly Story,” the name Jack Robinson appears.
“He told his fellow officers that he was an American and that if they wanted to give him a name, they might call him Jack Robinson,” O’Reilly wrote in an article, first printed in Liberty Weekly, May 27, 1933, in a serialization of his autobiography, “Born to Raise Hell.”
O’Reilly’s account, written several years following the disappearance of Bierce, has the missing journalist dying at the hands of three Federal volunteers, who, with Bierce’s revolver, shot him to death.
“He squatted there in the dust of the road and began to laugh heartily,” O’Reilly writes, “The three men kept shooting him, hitting him, but they could not kill him, and he did not stop laughing. He sat there and laughed till finally, they shot him in the heart.”
Much akin to Bierce’s yarns and the enigma that shrouded his departure, this tale remains nestled in the folds of mystery. A relic of antiquity, concealed within some forsaken attic or shadowed cellar of the Comstock, must yet emerge to illum the path of truth.
The Old Blog in the Desert 