“Although this somewhat tempered their sorrow, a thorn remained in their hearts, fearing that the moving lamentations and the mortal groans came from the lips of some hapless Spaniard.  This fatidical presentiment turned out unfortunately to be a fact.  The victim sacrificed that melancholy night, still remembered with a shudder by the priests, was Lieutenant Salvador Piera.  This brave soldier, who had made up his mind to die in the breach rather than surrender the town of Aparri, was persuaded to capitulate only by the prayers and tears of certain Spanish ladies who had been instructed to do so by a man who should have been the first one to shoulder a rifle.  After having been harassed in Aparri he was taken to Tuguegarao at the request of Esteban Quinta or Isidoro Maquigat, two artful filibusters thirsting to revenge themselves on the Lieutenant, who during the time of the Spanish government had justly laid his heavy hand upon them.  In the latter part of September they conducted him on foot and without any consideration whatever to the capital of Isabela.  In this town he was at once placed in solitary confinement in one of the rooms of the convento and allowed no intercourse with any one.  The sin for which they recriminated Piera was his having charged Dimas [283] with being a filibuster, and their revengefulness reached an incredible limit.  The heartrending moans of this martyr to his duty still resound in that convento converted into the scene of an orgy of blood.  The unfortunate man was heard to shout:  ’For God’s sake, for God’s sake, have pity,’ and trustworthy persons tell that under the strain of torture he would challenge them to fight in a fair field by saying:  ‘I will fight alone against twenty of you;’ but the cowardly torturers, a reproach to the Filipino race, looked upon it as an amusement to glut their spite on a defenceless man whose hands were tied.  They had him strung up all night with but insignificant refreshment and rest, sometimes being suspended by his arms which finally became disjointed and useless, and at others he was hung up by his feet, the blood rushing to his head and placing him in imminent danger of sudden death.  It was the intention of these brutes to torture him as much as possible before killing him, just as a member of the feline race plays with, tosses in the air and pirouettes around the victim which falls into his claws.  If to the torture of the rope are added the blows with cudgels and the butts of rifles which were frequently rained upon the victim it will be no surprise that early on the morning of the 30th he was in the throes of death in the midst of which the sufferer had just enough strength to say that he was hungry and thirsty; then those cannibals (the heart is filled with fury in setting forth such cruelty) cut a piece of flesh from the calf of the dying man’s leg and conveyed it to his mouth and instead of water they gave him to drink some of his own urine.  What savagery!