“On the third day, when those infuriated hyenas appeared to have spent their diabolical rage; after they had thrust a red-hot iron into his eyes and left him with sightless sockets; the poor martyr, the prey of delirium, cried out that he was hungry, and one of those sicarii cut a piece of flesh from Piera’s thigh and was infamous enough to carry it to his mouth.  On the night of the seventh of the month very late a number of wretches buried in the convento garden a body still dripping warm blood from the lips of which there escaped the feeble plaints of anguish of a dying man.”

The feeling of the Spaniards relative to this matter is well shown by the following statement of Father Malumbres:—­

“This horrible crime cannot be pardoned by God or man, and is still uninvestigated, crying to Heaven for vengeance with greater reason than the blood of the innocent Abel.  So long as the criminals remain unpunished it will be a black and indelible stigma and an ugly stain on the race harbouring in its midst the perpetrators of this unheard-of sin.  Words of reprobation are not enough, justice demands exemplary and complete reparation, and if the powers of earth do not take justice into their own hands, God will send fire from Heaven and will cause to disappear from the face of the earth the criminals and even their descendants.  A murder so cruel and premeditated can be punished in no other way.

“If the courts here should wish to punish the guilty persons it would not be a difficult task; the public points its finger at those who dyed their hands in the blood of the heroic soldier, and we shall set them forth here echoing the voice of the people.  The soulless instigator was Dimas Guzman.  The executioners were a certain Jose Guzman (alias Pepin, a nephew of Dimas) and Cayetano Perez.”

The matter was duly taken up in the courts, and Judge Blount himself tried the cases.

The judge takes a very mild and liberal view of the occurrence.  He says of it:  [284]—­

“Villa was accompanied by his aide, Lieutenant Ventura Guzman.  The latter is an old acquaintance of the author of the present volume, who tried him afterwards, in 1901, for playing a minor part in the murder of an officer of the Spanish army committed under Villa’s orders just prior to, or about the time of, the Wilcox-Sargent visit.  He was found guilty, and sentenced, but later liberated under President Roosevelt’s amnesty of 1902.  He was guilty, but the deceased, so the people in the Cagayan Valley used to say, in being tortured to death, got only the same sort of medicine he had often administered thereabouts.  At any rate, that was the broad theory of the amnesty in wiping out all these old cases.”

He adds:—­