In an example of foreshadowing, Henry starts to become uneasy about his wife’s impending arrival the later it gets in the day, at one point telling the narrator the following:
“I’m getting worried, I’m getting right down worried. I know she’s not due till about nine o’clock, and yet something seems to be trying to warn me that something’s happened. You don’t think anything has happened, do you?”
Henry’s worry “that something’s happened” to his wife is an example of foreshadowing because, as readers learn in the final paragraph of the story, Henry’s wife was abducted by Native Americans 19 years earlier. In this way, then, something has happened to his wife to prevent her arrival—it just happened almost two decades previously. Therefore, the “something” that “seems to be trying to warn” Henry that his wife isn’t going to make it home is likely deep in his own mind.
This moment sets the scene for Twain’s final reveal that while Henry initially seems to be the only truly happy man in the abandoned mining town, he is actually quite mad. In the same way that the mining town crumbled as people abandoned it, Henry’s mental health also fell apart in the wake of his wife’s disappearance (and presumed death).
