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!

"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
apar