Not long after entering his employ I was instrumental in saving his life. He had gone for an outing to an _atto_, or ranch, twenty miles from Guacara, which was near Valencia, where Gen. Ignacio Andrade was then stationed. The night after he left Caracas I learned through one of my agents that two hundred men were to start out at midnight ostensibly for Saint Lucia, but when part way there they were to proceed diagonally across the plains to the ranch at which Crespo was stopping, where they planned to capture and shoot him. I employed a dare-devil nephew of Guzman, whom I knew I could trust, to gallop at top speed to Andrade with a letter in which I told him of the plot. He immediately sent a messenger to the President to warn him of his danger, and followed him quickly with five hundred troops. Crespo was found two or three miles out on the ranch, and by his order the soldiers were hidden in and around the farm buildings. When the rebels came up they were surrounded before they knew what had happened. Their leader was shot on the spot and his lieutenants were imprisoned. Andrade did just what any other good soldier would have done, yet it was this act more than anything else, I have always believed, that caused Crespo to select him as his successor, with tragic results. Though deeply grateful to me he considered that he owed his life to Andrade. Several other plots against Crespo’s life were discovered and frustrated by the effective secret service I had created, and most of those who were implicated in them were properly punished. One of these murder schemes, which proved to be more serious than I at first supposed, involved the telephone in Crespo’s private room. The plan was to substitute for the regular receiver one which looked exactly like it but was not insulated, and then, when the President had answered a call and was holding the receiver against his ear, switch into the telephone the full current from an electric light dynamo, in the hope that the shock would be strong enough to kill him. My first inkling of this came from an American electrical engineer and while I satisfied myself that such a plot had been laid I never was able to get to the bottom of it, though I had an intelligent suspicion as to who was responsible for it.