"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. "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 José Guzman (alias Pepin, a nephew of Dimas) and Cayetano Pérez." The matter was duly taken up in the courts, and Judge Blount himself tried the cases.