“The blood from the wound finished the killing of the fainting Piera.  The blood shed served to infuriate more the barbarous executioners who in order to give the finishing stroke to the martyr, as an unrivalled expression of their savage ferocity, thrust a red-hot iron into his mouth and eyes.  That same night these treacherous and ferocious tyrants whose sin made them hate the light, buried the body in the darkness of the night in a patch of cogon grass adjoining the convento.”

Piera’s torture was by no means confined to this last night of his life, as the following account of it shows:—­

“In the first days of this accursed month, while the padres were bemoaning their fate in jail, a dark drama was being enacted in the convento, whose hair-raising scenes would have inspired terror to Montepiu himself.

“Lieutenant Salvador Piera of the Guardia Civil, commanding officer at Aparri, who, realizing that all resistance was useless, gave way to the persistent solicitations of Spaniards and natives and surrendered that town on honourable terms, which the Katipunan forces did not respect after the capitulation had been signed, was sent for by Villa, the military authority of Isabela.  Something terrible was going to happen as Piera himself felt confident, for it is said that before leaving Aparri he went to confession where he settled the important business of his conscience in a Christian manner with a representative of God.

“And so it turned out, for as soon as he arrived in Ilagan he was taken to the convento and placed incomunicado in one of its apartments.  Soon after, three or four vile fiends,—­for they do not deserve the name of men,—­bound him with strong cords and hanged him to a beam.  Then they began to charge him with having prosecuted a certain Mason, and inflicted upon him the most frightful tortures.  The pen refuses to set forth so many atrocities.  For three days they had him in that position while his vile assassins made a martyr of him.  Our hair stands on end to think of such crimes.  The heart-rending cries of this unfortunate man while prey to such barbarous torments could be heard in every part of the town and carried panic to the homes of all the inhabitants.

“The late hours of the night were always chosen by those treacherous fiends to give Piera the trato de cuerda (this form of torture consists in tying the hands of the victim behind his back and hanging him by them by a rope passed through a pulley attached to a beam; his body is lifted as high as it will go and then allowed to fall by its own weight without reaching the ground); but this torture was administered to him in a form so terrible that all the pictures of this kind of torment found in the dreadful narratives of the calumniators of the Holy Office, pale into insignificance in comparison with the atrocious details of the tortures here recited; at each violent jerk the unhappy victim feeling that his limbs were being torn asunder would cry out ‘My God!  My God!’ This terrifying cry reverberating through the jail would freeze the very blood of the poor priests therein incarcerated.