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.
A poor mother's despairing wail over her mortally wounded child, had been the slight spark needed to rekindle the blind rage of the Spanish soldiers. A soldier had held a crucifix before the infant's dying eyes, and the mother, fearing fresh cruelties, had wildly dashed it from the man's hand. That was more than provocation enough for gold-seekers who salved their greed for wealth and fame with the plea, that their journeyings were to widen the limits of Christ's kingdom.
Scarcely had the crucifix fallen to the ground ere the murdered woman fell beside it. Many a dead body had the man to move the following day ere he recovered the treasured symbol of an immortal love. All that night the leader of the expedition knelt, alone, in prayer.
All that night Montoro de Diego lay praying, faint and weak from loss of blood, shed at the commencement of the hideous fray in the vain effort to arrest the massacre. Never, so long as Montoro lived, did he hear the name of the little town of Caonao without a shudder, never did he remember the sounds of those women's wails, the sounds of those children's cries of dying agony, without a moan escaping his own lips, and a shivering horror overwhelming him that such things should have been.
One day for a day of burial, and then, in a solemn hush as though a funeral cortége, or a train of vanquished fugitives, the expedition formed again for marching, and retraced its steps to St. Jago. Montoro made one attempt to cheer his friend, but the soothing words were hurriedly put aside.
"Nay, nay, Diego. Speak not to me of comfort in our shame and bitter affliction. I came forth confident in my own strength, in my own power to rule man and to guide those under me in the ways of peace, and the Lord of Hosts has thus humbled my presumptuousness in the dust. Speak not to me of comfort; there is none save in prayer."