A Horseman in the Sky

“He was asleep at his post of duty. But if detected he would be dead shortly afterward, death being the just and legal penalty of his crime.”

Druse is asleep while on watch when readers meet him. The potential penalty is extreme, but apparently “just and legal” in the context of his job, raising questions about the nature of abstractions like justice and law in a military setting.

“This open ground looked hardly larger than an ordinary dooryard, but was really several acres in extent.”

The visual descriptions throughout the story feature illusions caused by perspective, distance, and scale. Here a vast distant space is easily mistaken for a small yard. Ambrose Bierce employs a type of visual irony in which things are the opposite of what they appear to be.

“No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war.”

Humanity, not nature, is the agent of war in this story. “Theater” is not only the customary word for the region in which a battle is fought. It also foreshadows the tragic spectacle at the center of the story.