picion of having been bought, had done his best to hand over the Palacio Nacional to the insurgents.

Many dead and wounded were in the Plaza. The body of General Reyes lay within a stone's throw of the central gates, but no orders were given for its removal or for the relief of soldiers or civilians whose injuries held them where they fell. Gustavo Madero was no longer in command, and he refrained from assuming any further responsibility. General Villar's wound explains his inaction and that of his men. The bullet which had hit him was a very choice missile from the cartridge box of fate. My own opinion is that the whole clan Madero fell at that shot. For Villar was a brave man, not without ability, capable of holding his ambition in check at the demand of honor. To his position as commander of the post Huerta succeeded, with addition of authority such as might have been conferred on Villar but for his disablement; and it is not unlikely that he would have saved the State, winning an easy triumph where an abler soldier failed for lack of honest will.

The loss was not immediately appreciated by Gustavo Madero, to whom it seemed that the first skirmish had ended very well. The strain of that extraordinary night was now relaxed. One round in the game of life and death had been played through, and the chief loser's stake paid out there in the Plaza. The hour had come when a man might stretch his limbs and seek a little refreshment; and Gustavo ordered his car and rode forth into the morning air, to the home of his friend, Angel Casso, in the Calle Marselle, and sat down with him to breakfast.

Over the coffee there arose some question as to the killing of the spectators in the square, and Gustavo explained it, saying that it was due to the zeal of the peon gunners who, excepting two or three, had never before fired machine guns at a living target, and were curious to learn how

much destruction they could work by the mere turning of a little crank. Upon the whole, however, they had done so well that no immediate renewal of the assault upon the Palace need be feared.

It was not until nine o'clock that President Madero reached the center of the city. At that hour he appeared on Avenida Juarez on the southern side of the Alamada at the head of about one thousand men made up of Chepultepec cadets and mounted police. At the National Theatre he was urged to go no farther, and as he stood there in plain view he was shot at from one of the upper windows of the great unfinished theater building. Owing to a sudden movement of his horse the bullet missed him narrowly, and killed a negro on the sidewalk.

Turning to the officer in charge of his body guard of cadets and police, Madero directed him to see to the capture of the enemy in the theater, and then to return to Chepultepec to await further orders. The officer ventured to express astonishment. Was it possible that the President meant to ride the half mile through Avenida San Francisco alone, while the city was ablaze with insurrection?

Madero smiled. He turned his big gray horse toward the Plaza and without further parley proceeded on his way, his only attendant being a colonel who rode at his side. He had, however, an unofficial advance guard in an American Jew named Blum, who was apparently seeking personal advertisement. Blum was a dealer in horses and their pedigrees, and it was said that in a trade he would often furnish a pedigree much better than the one to which the animal was entitled. His carelessness in the assortment of the two commodities, the horse and the pedigree, had resulted in frequent expulsions from the Jockey Club racetrack, but he would always come back again. And it is quite accordant with the grotesqueness of this national tragedy,

that the well-known Blum-who afterwards sold milch cows to Felix Diaz at the Arsenal should now precede the President who had just escaped by inches from assassination, and was inviting another attempt at every movement of his unguarded progress to the National Palace, on this Sunday morning.

Not until he reached the Plaza strewn with dead did Madero realize the seriousness of what had occurred. Hurrying to his official quarters he set in operation the work of succor and removal, personally directing that the body of General Reyes be brought into the Palace. Then the wheels of outraged government began to revolve swiftly. A cabinet meeting passed sentence of death and immediate execution upon the captured General Ruis, and Colonel Morelos, the Palace commandant. The sentence was carried out that afternoon, and before night General Victoriano Huerta, who was on waiting orders in the capital, was summoned to the Palace and placed in chief command of all the troops in and about Mexico City.

A

CHAPTER XV

FTER General Huerta was put in chief command of the Government's forces, on February 9, cannon and

small arms were the instruments of pandemonium in the City of Mexico, much property was destroyed, and many persons were killed, up to the time of the coup d'etat on the 18th. There were opposing camps, so to speak; the Palace and the Arsenal, the established government under Madero and the revolt nominally under Diaz, were at war. But all this was mere seeming, and differed from the truth in every essential particular. There was no warfare, and even of anything that could be called fighting there was very little. The affair was dishonest, root, branch and twig; dishonest as a squabble started by thieves in a crowd to draw attention from the picking of pockets.

The mockery was plainly apparent to many who had no knowledge of military affairs; it could hardly have deceived any person of intelligence who was not blinded by some prepossession. The usual version of this ten days' riot in uniform, this random bombardment with modern weapons in a densely populated city, is that General Huerta served the Government faithfully as long as he had any hope of success; that the Arsenal in which the Felix Diaz forces were entrenched was found to be impregnable, and that to avoid further bloodshed, Huerta finally agreed to the dethronement of Madero as a compromise for peace. In the process of bringing this about, so runs the tale, his own ambitions awoke to personal opportunity with results now well established in common knowledge.

This version does Huerta's moral nature too much honor and fails in fair credit to his clear Indian brain. The various bodies of troops subject to his orders exceeded ten thousand men, while at no time did the Diaz forces reach eighteen hundred. The artillery at Huerta's command included siege guns and other heavy cannon of the SchneiderCanet and Mondragon-Canet types, while in light batteries and machine guns his equipment was greatly superior to that of Felix Diaz.

The report that the Arsenal was "impregnable" reflected credit upon the inventor of that fiction as a person of audacity and imagination. An attacking force which meant business would have operated from the south or southwest, and would have had no trouble in planting batteries in such convenient positions that the artilleryman who could not have landed every shot in the Arsenal's broad and fully exposed façade would have been one who had mistaken his calling. The land south of the Arsenal is almost entirely open for the six hundred yards or so to Avenida Chepultepec, and for a like distance farther to Indianilla, the headquarters of Mexico City's tramway service. Some of this region was alleged to be held by Diaz troops, a gentle attempt at humor considering the forces which, if their commander had been so disposed, could have swept the place clean by the simple expedient of walking into it.

A force which was operating seriously against the Arsenal would have advanced by way of Avenida Chepultepec to the broad Calle Balderas; and while a moderate assortment of cannon balls was being fired into the conspicuous stone building six or seven blocks distant, the force would have marched deliberately in wide column along the street named to the desired stations. In the thirty minutes which this advance would have occupied the operating batteries would