In El Paso, where I was utterly unacquainted, I had to find some friend in whose stanchness I could put the ultimate trust. Being a Roman Catholic, I made friends with a priest and led him into gossip about different members of his flock. He spoke of a harnessmaker and saddler, one E. Koglmeier, an unmarried man of about fifty, who kept a shop in South Santa Fe Street. He was, the priest said, the most simple-minded, simple-hearted and utterly faithful man he knew. I lost no time in making Koglmeier’s acquaintance, on the priest’s introduction, and we soon were on friendly terms. When I crossed the international bridge I left behind in his safe a sealed package of papers. He knew only that he was to speak to no one about them and was to deliver them only to me in person or to a man who bore my written order for them. I reported to the German Consul in Juarez. He asked me to carry on to Chihuahua certain reports and letters addressed to Kueck, the German Consul there. From Chihuahua Kueck sent me on to Parral with other documents. And a German official in Parral gave me another parcel of papers to carry back to Kueck. I had no sooner reached Chihuahua on the return trip than I was put under arrest by an officer of the Federal (Huertista) forces, then in control of the city. I asked on whose authority. On that, he said, of Gen. Salvador Mercado. I was a spy engaged in disseminating anti-Federal propaganda. I had to laugh at the sheer absurdity of that, and asked what proofs he had to sustain such charges. “The papers you are carrying,” he said then, “will be proof enough, I think.” Chihuahua was under martial law. I had not the slightest inkling as to what might be in those papers I had so obligingly transported. I had put my foot into it, as your saying goes, up to my neck, the place where a noose fits. They marched me up to the cuartel and into the presence of Gen. Mercado. That was June 23, 1913, at 9 o’clock in the evening. Gen. Salvador Mercado, then the supreme authority in Chihuahua, with practical powers of life and death over its people, proved to be a squat, thick, bull-necked man with a face of an Indian and the bearing of a bully. His first words stirred my temper to the bottom, luckily for me. If I had confronted the man with any other emotion than raging anger I should not be alive now. “Your Consul will do no good,” he told me sneeringly. “He says you are not a German. You are a Gringo. You are a bandit and a robber. You have turned spy against us, too, I am going to make short work of you. But first you are going to tell me all you know.” As the completeness of the frame-up flashed upon me I went wild. There was a chair beside me. I converted one leg into a club and started for Mercado. The five other men in the room got the best holds upon me that they could. By the time they had mastered me Mercado had backed away into the furthest corner of the room.