ished 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 Jose
Guzman (alias Pepin, a nephew of Dimas) and Cayetano Perez."

The matter was duly taken up in the courts, and Judge Blount himself
tried the cases.

The judge takes a very mild and liberal view of the occurrence. He
says of it: [284]--

"Villa was accompanied by his aide, Lieutenant Ventura Guzman. The
latter is an old acquaintance of the author of the present volume,
who tried him afterwards, in 1901, for playing a minor part in the
murder of an officer of the Spanish army committed under Villa's orders
just prior to, or about the time of, the Wilcox-Sargent visit. He
was found guilty, and sentenced, but later liberated under President
Roosevelt's amnesty of 1902. He was guilty, but the deceased, so
the people in the Cagayan Valley used to say, in being tortured to
death, got only the same sort of medicine he had often administered
thereabouts. At any rate, that was the broad theory of the amnesty
in wiping out all these old cases."

He adds:--

"I sentenced both Dimas and Ventura to life imprisonment for being
accessory to the murder of the Spanish officer above named, Lieutenant
Piera. Villa officiated as arch-fiend on the grewsome occasion. I am
quite sure I would have hung Villa without any compunction at that
time, if I could have gotten hold of him. I tried to get hold of
him, but Governor Taft's attorney-general, Mr. Wilfley, wrote me
that Villa was somewhere over on the mainland of Asia on British
territory, and extradition would involve application to the London
Foreign Office. The intimation was that we had trouble enough of
our own without borrowing any from feuds that had existed under