Quick as lightning, the boy had regained his saddle, and recommenced his desperate course, brandishing his knife, and laughing with the grin of a demon.
When, after the first moment of stupor had passed, the people turned to pursue the murderer, he had disappeared. No one could tell which way he had gone. As is generally the case under such circumstances, the juez de letras (criminal judge), accompanied by a crowd of ragged alguaciles, arrived on the spot where the murder had been committed when it was too late.
The juez de letras, Don Inigo Tormentes Albaceyte, was a man of some fifty years of age, short and stout, with an apoplectic face, who took snuff out of a gold box enriched with diamonds, and concealed under an apparent bonhomie a profound avarice backed by excessive cunning and a coolness which nothing could move.
Contrary to what might have been expected, the worthy magistrate did not appear the least in the world disconcerted by the flight of the assassin; he shook his head two or three times, cast a glance round the crowd, and winked his little grey eye,—
"Poor Cornejo!" he said, stuffing his nose philosophically with snuff: "this was sure to happen to him some day or other."
"Yes," said a lepero, "he was neatly killed!"
"That is what I was thinking," the judge replied; "he who gave this blow knew what he was about; the fellow is a practised hand."
"Humph!" the lepero replied, with a shrug of his shoulders, "he is a boy."
"Bah!" the judge said, with feigned astonishment, and casting an under-glance at the speaker; "a boy!"
"Little more," the lepero added, proud of being thus listened to; "it was Rafaël, Don Ramón's eldest son."