During this time one of Morazan's piquets had been cut off and the officers murdered, which created a great excitement among his soldiers; but, anxious to avoid shedding more blood, he sent into the city for the Canonigo Castillo and Barundia, deputing them as commissioners to persuade the bandits to surrender their arms, even offering to pay fifteen dollars a head rather than come to extremities. The commissioners found Carrera at one of his old haunts among the mountains of Matasquintla surrounded by hordes of Indians living upon tortillas. The traitor Barundia had been received by Morazan's soldiers with groans; his poor jaded horse was tied up at Morazan's camp a day and a half without a blade of grass; and, as a farther reward of his treason, Carrera refused to meet him under a roof, because, as he said, he did not wish to plunge his new lance, a present from a priest, into Barundia's breast.
The meeting took place in the open air, and on the top of a mountain. Carrera refused to lay down his arms unless all his former demands were complied with, and unless also the Indian capitation tax was reduced to one-third of its amount; but he softened his asperity against foreigners to the demand that only those not married should be expelled the country, and that thereafter they should be permitted to traffic only, and not to radicate in it. The atrocious priest Padre Lobo, his constant friend and adviser, was with him. The arguments of the Canonigo Castillo, particularly in regard to the folly of charging the government with an attempt to poison the Indians, were listened to with much attention by them, but Carrera broke up the conference by asserting vehemently that the government had offered him twenty dollars a head for every Indian he poisoned.
All hope of compromise was now at an end, and General Morazan marched directly to Matasquintla; but before he reached it, Carrera's bands had disappeared among the mountains. He heard of them in another place, devastating the country, desolating villages and towns, and again, before his troops could reach them, the muskets were concealed, and the Indians either in the mountains or quietly working in the fields. Mr. Hall, the British vice-consul, received a letter from eleven British subjects at Salama, a distance of three days' journey, stating that they had been seized at night by a party of Carrera's troops, stripped of everything, confined two nights and a day without food, and sentenced to be shot, but finally ordered to leave the country, which they were then doing, destitute of everything, and begging their way to the port. A few nights after, at ten o'clock, the cannon of alarm was sounded in the city, and it was reported that Carrera was again at the gates. All this time party strife was as violent as ever;
