arrest, and Huerta forthwith sentenced him to be shot.  That same day the sentence was to be put into execution.  Villa was already facing the firing squad, and the officer in charge had given the command to load, when President Madero’s brother, Emilio, who was serving on Huerta’s staff in an advisory capacity, put a stop to the execution by taking Villa under his personal protection.  President Madero was telegraphed to, and immediately replied, reprieving Villa’s sentence, and ordering him to be sent to Mexico City pending further official investigation.

This act of interference infuriated Huerta.  For the moment he had to content himself with formulating a long string of serious charges against Villa, ranging from military insubordination to burglary, highway robbery, and rape.  It was even given out at headquarters that Villa had struck his commanding general.

Huerta never forgave the Madero brothers for their part in this affair, and his resentment was fanned to white heat, subsequently, when Francisco Villa was allowed to escape scot-free from his prison in Mexico City.

Meanwhile Huerta kept telegraphing to President Madero for more reenforcements of men, munitions, and supplies, more engines, more railway trains and tank cars, and, above all, for more artillery.  Madero kept sending them, though it cost his Government a new loan of forty million dollars.  Every other day or so a new train, with fresh supplies, arrived at the front.

At the end of several more weeks, when Orozco had slowly retreated half-way through the State of Chihuahua, and when he found that the destruction of the big seven-span bridge over the Conchos River at Santa Rosalia did not permanently stop Huerta’s advance, he reluctantly decided to make another stand at the deep cut of Bachimba, just south of Chihuahua City.  This was in July.

By this time General Huerta’s Federal column had swelled to 7,500 fighting men, 20 pieces of field artillery, 30 machine guns, and some 7,500 camp-followers and women, making a total of more than 15,000 persons of all sexes and ages, who were being carried along on more than twenty railroad trains, stretching over a dozen miles of single track.  The column was so long that some of my companions and I, when we climbed a high hill near the front end of the column at Bachimba, found it impossible to discern the tail end through our field-glasses.  All the hungry people that were being carried on all those twenty railroad trains had to be fed, of course, so that none of us were surprised to read in the Mexican newspapers that the Chihuahua campaign was now costing Madero’s Government nearly 500,000 pesos per day.