Soon after the breach between Villa and Carranza in 1915, a small detachment of Carranza troops occupied the village of Icamole, east of Chihuahua State in the direction of Monterey and Saltillo. The Villista forces in that quarter, commanded by General Tomas Urbina, one of the most ruthless of all the Villa subcommanders, who was himself later put to death, were encamped not far from Icamole, attempting to beleaguer the town or, at least, to cut the Carranza garrison off from its base of supplies and the main command. Neither side was strong enough to risk an engagement and the whole thing settled down into a waiting and sniping campaign. In the gray of one oppressive morning toward the end of 1915, according to the surgeon who was with Urbina, one of that commander’s scouts gave an alarm, having seen four mules and two men on the horizon, making toward Icamole. A mounted detachment was at once sent out and the strangers were brought in. They turned out to be an American of advanced years but military bearing, a nondescript Mexican, and four mules laden with the parts of a machine gun and a large quantity of its ammunition. Both men were immediately taken before General Urbina, according to the surgeon’s story, and subjected to questioning. The Mexican said that he had been employed by another Mexican, whose name he did not know, to conduct the American and his convoy to Icamole and the Carranza commander. Urbina turned to the American and started to question him, but found that the man could speak hardly any Spanish and was therefore unable to explain his actions or to defend himself. It may be as well to note the first objections to the credibility of the story here. Bierce had been in Mexico almost two years, according to these dates. He was a man of the keenest intelligence and the quickest perceptions. He had also lived in California for many years, where Spanish names are common and Spanish is spoken by many. It seems hard to believe that such a man could have survived to the end of 1915 in such ignorance of the speech of the Mexican people as to be unable to explain what he was doing or to tell his name and who he was. It seems hard to believe, also, that Bierce would have been doing any gun-running or that he could have been alive twenty months after the Chihuahua letter without communicating with some one in the United States, without being found or heard of by the military and diplomatic agents who had then already been seeking him for more than a year. Also, it is necessary to explain how the man who went down to fight with Villa happened suddenly to be taking a gun and ammunition to Villa’s enemies, though this might be reconciled on the theory that Bierce had gone to fight with the Constitutionalists and had remained with them when Villa rebelled. But we may disregard these minor discrepancies as possibly capable of reconciliation or correction, and proceed further with the surgeon’s story.