Ambrose Bierce's The Middle Toe of the Right Foot: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis
- Michael Kellermeyer
- a few seconds ago
- 6 min read
Like so many of Bierce’s ghost stories – “The Thing at Nolan,” “A Vine on a House,” “Present at a Hanging,” “An Arrest,” etc. – this tale classifies as being of the “murder-will-out” genre. Stories like this are among the oldest in the supernatural canon, and such tales of postmortem revenge are common in European and Appalachian folklore (from which Bierce derived the motifs used here). It also contains another theme frequently recycled throughout Bierce’s oeuvre: domestic violence. From “The Moonlit Road” and “The Eyes of the Panther” to “A Fruitless Assignment” and “Halpin Frayser,” the idée fixe of familicide relentlessly haunts Bierce’s fiction.
In the following tale he uses the familiar, discombobulating literary devices of a nonlinear plot, starting in media res, secret identities, and a twist ending. Although it lacks the finesse of “Halpin Frayser” or “The Moonlit Road,” its telltale conclusion has made it one of Bierce’s most popular ghost stories, and it continues to be widely anthologized as a classic of American Gothicism.
SUMMARY
One of Bierce's most cinematic ghost stories—redolent with urban-legend/campfire-story-style creepy visuals, slow-burning build-up, and savage catharsis—this episode recounts a grim and ironic tale of revenge, guilt, and supernatural terror centered on the abandoned Manton house, a structure universally believed to be haunted. The house stands in desolation near the road between Marshall and Harriston, shunned for more than a decade.
Its decay—rotting fences, boarded windows, broken glass, and encroaching weeds—serves as visible testimony to its evil reputation. The local humorist of the Marshall Advance quips that “the proposition that the Manton house is badly haunted is the only logical conclusion from the premises.” The house’s notoriety stems from a brutal crime committed ten years earlier: Mr. Manton, in the night, “rose and cut the throats of his wife and two small children,” then fled the region. Since that time, the house has been regarded as a fitting site for supernatural manifestations.
One summer evening, four men arrive at the deserted house in a wagon. Three dismount; the fourth, a middle-aged, powerfully built man with a forbidding face and unnatural pallor, hesitates. He suspects treachery: “By God!… this is a trick, and it looks to me as if you were in it.” He is assured that he himself agreed to let the opposing side choose the location. Shamed by the suggestion that he fears “spooks,” he angrily descends.
Inside the dusty, cobweb-filled room, illuminated faintly by candlelight, the grim purpose of their meeting becomes clear: they are here to fight a backwoods duel to the death. The pale, sinister man is Mr. Grossmith; his opponent is Mr. Rosser. Their seconds and a facilitator oversee preparations for the contest.
Two identical bowie-knives are produced and examined. The men remove their outer garments and take positions in opposite corners of the empty room. At the final moment, the candle is extinguished, plunging them into total darkness. A voice commands that neither move until the outer door is closed. The seconds depart, leaving the two men alone.
Shortly thereafter, a farmer’s boy claims to see a wagon racing toward Marshall, driven by two men with a third white-clad figure standing behind them, hands upon their bowed shoulders. The story appears in the Advance, but none of the involved gentlemen publicly explain the events.
***
The narrative then recounts the events that led to the duel. On the porch of a hotel in Marshall, three young men—King, Sancher, and Rosser—are conversing when a stranger, Robert Grossmith, sits within earshot. King remarks, “I hate any kind of deformity in a woman,” and claims he once abandoned a charming girl because she had lost a toe.
Sancher darkly jokes that she later married Manton and “escaped with a parted throat.” King speculates that Manton may have murdered her upon discovering she lacked “the middle toe of the right foot.” At this, Rosser notices Grossmith listening intently. Angered, Rosser insults him and demands he move away.
Grossmith rises in fury but regains composure and demands “the satisfaction due to a gentleman.” Sancher reluctantly agrees to act as his second, while King supports Rosser. A duel is arranged for the following evening—“a duel in the dark,” a brutal practice once known in "the Southwest" (at the time meaning the Lower Mississipi Valley: Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana), thinly veiled by so-called chivalry.
The story returns to the Manton house the day after the duel. In bright noon sunlight, Sheriff Adams, Deputy King, and Brewer—the brother of the murdered Mrs. Manton—arrive on official business regarding the abandoned property. To their surprise, the front door stands unlocked. In the entryway lies a heap of men’s clothing: two hats, coats, waistcoats, and scarves. Alarmed, they enter the room where the duel occurred.
In the far corner, they see a crouching figure. It is a man, stone dead, kneeling with his back pressed into the angle of the wall. His posture conveys abject terror: shoulders hunched to his ears, hands raised before his face with fingers “spread and crooked like claws,” eyes “incredibly expanded,” mouth half open. A bowie-knife lies fallen from his hand. The body is rigid; he appears to have died of fright rather than violence.
Brewer suddenly cries, “God of mercy! It is Manton!” King confirms the identification: though Manton once wore a beard and long hair, he recognizes him.
***
King’s internal thoughts reveal a hidden truth. He and the others had recognized Grossmith as Manton from the beginning. They deliberately lured him into the haunted house, staging the duel as a “horrible trick” against a “murderer and coward.” When Rosser fled the dark room moments after the candle’s extinguishing—so hastily that he left his outer garments behind—they abandoned Manton alone in the darkness of the house where he had slaughtered his family.
The cause of Manton’s death remains mysterious but unmistakable. He never left his corner; he neither attacked nor defended. He dropped his weapon and perished “of sheer horror of something that he saw.” The dust on the floor tells the rest. There are confused footprints near the entrance and along the wall where Manton had edged his way to the corner.
But more chilling are three parallel lines of footprints leading from the door straight toward him: the light impressions of bare feet—two small, belonging to children, and between them, those of a woman. They end about a yard from the corpse and do not return.
Brewer, pale and trembling, points to the nearest print of the woman’s right foot. “Look at that!” he cries. “The middle toe is missing—it was Gertrude!” Gertrude was his sister, Mrs. Manton, murdered by her husband ten years before.
Thus the story closes with the revelation that Manton, brought back to the scene of his crime under the pretense of a duel, was confronted in darkness by what appeared to be the apparitions of his wife and children.
Whether supernatural visitants or hallucinations born of guilt, their silent advance across the dusty floor proved more deadly than any knife. The missing middle toe, once a trivial detail in idle conversation, becomes the unmistakable sign of identity and the final proof that Manton died in terror before the returning presence of his wronged family.
ANALYSIS
The motif of a ghost leaving a telltale sign of its violent interference in the physical world is a classic trope employed by many of horror literature’s darlings. Lovecraft would use this in “In the Vault,” where a miserly sexton has his ankle tendons severed by a vindictive client’s teeth (the dead man was missing teeth on the lower jaw, and his bite marks reflect this).
It would also be utilized in Guy de Maupassant’s “The Hand,” wherein the owner of a mummified hand is discovered strangled, and the bruises on his throat match the hand’s missing first finger. In E. Nesbit’s “Man-Size in Marble” a man notices that one of the fingers is missing from an allegedly haunted funerary statue, only to find it clutched in the cold hand of his dead, ravished wife when he returns home.
Building off of de Maupassant and presaging Lovecraft’s later work, F. Marion Crawford’s “The Screaming Skull” tells of how the owner of a skull missing teeth in the lower jaw was found with his throat torn out, and the coroner notes that the teeth marks are those of a human missing two teeth on the lower jaw. This particular story also specifically riffs off of Bierce’s “Middle-Toe” in that the skull is heavily implied to be that of the man’s long-murdered wife, and his death (after being abandoned to a dark house by a terrified visitor) is clearly revenge for her murder.