Botello turned, with those dull-burning, sullen eyes of his fixed upon his friend.
"If it is thus with him," he said between his clenched teeth, "then will he receive due punishment in witnessing the slaughter of those he thus dares to cherish. But come, the hour has arrived, and the victims."
And suddenly, with a wild cry, he dashed forward towards a group of some hundreds of defenceless Indians—men, women, and children—laden with fruits, and jars of water for their Spanish guests. Snatching his sword from its sheath it flashed for a few moments in the sun, as he brandished it on high, and then, with a madman's howl, he plunged it into the bodies of an infant and its mother who was advancing with a timid smile to offer drink to the thirsty travellers.
Tearing the reeking weapon from his first quivering victims he rushed on over them, dealing death and wounds frantically around him. For some moments he was alone in his dread activity. The Indians were spellbound with the dismal horror. Even his own fellows were awe-struck with the impetus of the hideous onslaught.
But quickly the scene changed. In his fatal career the wretched madman cut down the beloved young squaw of a tall and unusually powerful Indian, before he could fling himself before her as a cover. Baffled of his loving effort he threw himself upon the Spaniard, utterly regardless, in his despairing fury, of the blood-dripping sword. Snapping it with his hands as though it had been a thread from his native cotton plants, he tossed away the pieces, and then, with those sinewy, disengaged fingers, throttled his antagonist, and cast the dead body of the wretched Botello beside that of the murdered Indian.
The red man's ferocious shout of triumph was the signal for answering shouts of fury from the Spaniards. They had looked on while innocent and gentle women and children were ruthlessly slaughtered, but the sight of one of their own number slain was one that aroused all their fiercest feelings of revenge, and ere it could be well said that they had had time for thought swords and daggers were flashing in the light, the fair, flower-bestrewn earth was streaming with blood, and mangled bodies of dead and dying creatures, some still clasping their simple offerings, that pleaded for good-will, in their stiffening hands, were piled in awful heaps around the camping ground.
To this drear, sickening sight Montoro de Diego rushed forward as he saw the tumult that was raging. Guzman, one of the few who remained faithful to his leader's trust in him, flew to the temple to summon Las Casas. The redskins' friend was just issuing from the building when his follower reached it, breathless with haste, pallid with horror, and bespattered with gore from the pitiful victims who had been falling in wholesale crowds around him. The countenance of the clerigo turned pale also as he caught sight of the panting soldier.
"What is it?" he exclaimed. "Our brethren—what of them? Is it a massacre?"
Guzman nodded. He could not speak; one word he managed to gasp out—"Go." For a massacre it was indeed, though not of the nature imagined by Las Casas; not a massacre perpetrated by ignorant heathen of those from whom they had scarce ever received ought but wrong, but a massacre barbarously committed by Christians on those from whom they had received nought but kindness and submissive respect. But Las Casas waited not to learn more from his breathless retainer. He saw the wild tumult surging in the distance; he heard the confused roar of mingled shrieks, shouts, yells, and groans; and whatever was going forward that concerned his company his place was in their midst, to die with them if their rescue were no longer possible.
In a moment of time this decision had darted through his brain, and the next instant he was flying over the ground that intervened between the temple of Caonao, and the open plain where the deadliest of the uproar was in awful progress.