Gradually some put back the hair from their faces and ventured to look around them, mothers loosened their convulsive grasp of their children, and the climbers on the rafters swung themselves down to the ground again. But even Las Casas could see that all was not yet achieved for the restoration of peace. At a few hundred yards' distance the horrible, shameful work of slaughter still continued, and once more quitting the hut and its defenceless multitude, Bartholomew Las Casas dashed onwards to repeat his efforts at arresting the wholesale murder of defenceless men, helpless women, the aged and the infant. "Oh, Montoro!" he ejaculated as to himself, as he neared this fresh scene of horror. "Alas! Montoro de Diego, where canst thou have been to allow such things!" A voice from beside his feet answered him--"I am here, my friend. Disabled at the first moment. But do not heed me. Hasten to save what poor remnant there may yet remain of these unhappy victims." Las Casas looked at his half fainting friend, then at the dreadful _mêlée_ beyond, and with a hurried--"I will return immediately," he ran on, and a second time hurled his furious commands at his followers to cease their cowardly slaughter of their helpless prey. A second time the leader's voice and the leader's presence cowed the Spaniards back to order--momentarily. From the rear where the hut lay there suddenly broke upon the air wilder shrieks and yells than had been heard before. Deep oaths and curses of Spanish throats were mingled with the shrill Indian cries, and off darted the soldiers gathered about Las Casas to join their other comrades. They were like so many score of bloodhounds, with the taste for blood so aroused that it could no more be satisfied. Not again could the friend of the Indians reach the doorway of that hut until it had become a charnel-house, so crammed with the dead and dying, that the stoutest heart might turn away from the ghastly task of learning if there were yet any, amongst those heaps of mangled bodies, to whom it might be possible to speak last words of pity. There had been five hundred living human beings crowded into that building when Las Casas left it ten minutes ago, now there lay there five hundred mangled bodies lying in crimson pools, some already stiff and stark, some writhing in the death agonies, none ever to see the sun in this world again, or to learn on earth that the religion called the Christian faith, which those white intruders came to spread, was not the religion of a demon more vile than any their untaught imaginings had ever dared portray.