a wise and able ruler, no
matter how severe.

These fond hopes were changed to gloomy foreboding only a few weeks
after Huerta's assumption of the presidency, when he was seen to
surround himself with notorious wasters of all kinds, and when he was
seen to fall into Madero's old error of extending the "glad hand" to
unrepentant rebels and bandits like Orozco, Cheche Campos, Tuerto
Morales, and Salgado.

Victoriano Huerta, whether he be considered as a general or as a
president, can be expressed in one phrase: He is an Indian.

Huerta himself proudly says that he is a pure-blooded Aztec. His
friends claim for him that he has the virtues of an Indian--courage,
patience, endurance, and dignified reserve. His enemies, on the other
hand, profess to see in him some of the vices of Indian blood.

From what I have seen of General Huerta in the field, in private life,
and as a President, I would say that he combines in himself both the
virtues and the faults of his race. In battle I have seen him expose
himself with a courage worthy of the best Indian traditions; nor have I
ever heard it intimated by any one that he was a coward. One of his
strong points as a commander was that he was a man of few words. On the
other hand, his own soldiers at the front hailed him as a stern and
cruel leader; and some of the things that were done to his prisoners of
war at the front were enough to curdle any one's blood.

It was during a moment of conviviality that General Huerta once
revealed his true sentiments toward the United States and ourselves.
This was during a banquet given in his honor at Mexico City on the eve
of his departure to the front in Chihuahua. On this occasion an
Englishman, who had long been on terms of intimacy with Huerta, asked
the General what he would do if northern Mexico should secede to the
United States and the Americans should take a hand in the fray. This
question aroused General Huerta to the following extemporary speech:

"I am not afraid of the _gringoes_. Why should I be? No good Mexican
need be afraid of the _gringoes_. If it had not been for the treachery
of President Santa Anna, who sold himself to the United States in 1847,
we should have beaten the Yankees then, as we surely shall beat them
the next time. Let them cross the Rio Bravo! We will send them back
with bloody heads.

"We Mexicans need not be afraid of any foreign nation. Did we not beat
the Spaniards? Did we not also beat the French, an