“The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier--restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which today we should call indigence, than, impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature, they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meager comforts which they had voluntarily renounced.”

The author gently mocks the early settlers, who barely attain what he calls “indigence”—or what would be considered poverty in more civilized regions—before seeking new homesteads even further west. Bierce contrasts their restlessness, part of the development of the American frontier, with Murlock’s decision to stay in his rustic, neglected cabin for decades, his sense of adventure snuffed out by a strange incident in his past.

“He lived alone in a house of logs surrounded on all sides by the great forest, of whose gloom and silence he seemed a part, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak a needless word.” 

A sense of foreboding emerges from the forest and permeates the cabin and its owner, who seems resigned to it. Something terrible happened here that took the spirit out of the man. Taciturn and insular, he wants little to do with humanity.

“Apparently the man's zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing flame, expiring in penitential ashes.”

The thing that destroyed his spirit also fills him with remorse and guilt. No longer does he try to keep up the property; he lets it grow wild, as if wishing to be absorbed back into the forest.