The friar hurried to Pizarro. “Do you not see,” he said, “that whilst we waste our breath talking to this dog, the fields are filling with Indians? Set on at once! I absolve you.” Slay! Slay! mass or massacre. The old cry of the Romish priest, covetous of converts. The sword in one hand, the crucifix in the other; abjuration of heresy, or the blood of heretics. In Smithfield and the Cevennes, on the dread eve of St Bartholomew, and amidst the gentle sun-worshippers of Peru,--such has ever been the maxim of the ministers of a religion of mercy. In this instance the appeal to violence was not unheard. Pizarro waved a scarf, a signal gun was fired from the fort, the barrack doors flew open, and, armed to the teeth, the Spaniards sprang into the plaza, shouting the fierce slogan before which, in Granada’s sunny _vega_, the Moslem had so often quailed. “_Santiago y à ellos!_” St James and at them! was the cry, as the steel-clad cavalry spurred into the crowd, carving, with trenchant blade, paths through the confused and terrified Indians; whilst musketry flashed, and two falconets, placed in the fort, vomited death upon the mob. The exit from the plaza was soon choked with corpses, and the living, debarred escape by the bodies of the dead, could but stand and be slaughtered. The square was soon converted into a shambles. “Even as they fell, in files they lay,” slain in cold blood, and innocent of offence. At last “such was the agony of the survivors under the terrible pressure of their assailants, that a large body of Indians, by their convulsive struggles, burst through the wall of stone and dried clay which formed part of the boundary of the plaza!” And the country was covered with fugitives, flying before the terrible sweep of the Spanish sabre.