Suddenly the traffic is held up and from Copou—a suburb of Jassy—a crowd of foot people approach, all gesticulating and hollering. They seem to accompany some one: soldiers, watchmen, spectators. In all the windows and doors are crowds of greedy observers.
“Ah, ha,” thinks Leiba. “Now they have caught a robber!”
The crowd comes nearer. Sura slips out of the crowd and comes up to where Leiba is standing on the rest-house steps.
“A madman from Golia[2]—escaped.”
“Let’s close up so he can’t attack us.”
“Oh, they’ve bound him. But before they did it, he beat the soldiers. The bad tempered Christians shoved a Jew out of the crowd, and the madman bit him on the cheek.”
From the front steps Leiba has a fine vantage point from which to see. On the step below Sura stands holding the baby.
There he goes—the madman whom two soldiers are trying to hold. His arms are bound by strong ropes. The man has the body of a giant. His head is just like a bull’s; black, thick-curled. Hair covers his face—dark, in disorder. What a mass of hair covers his head! He is bare-footed; he keeps spitting blood and the hair he bit from the cheek of the Jew. Now the crowd pauses. What is the trouble?
The soldiers free the madman. The people step aside and make an open space about him. The madman pauses and sweeps the circle with his eyes, which at length pause by Zibal’s door. He gnashes his teeth, then darts for the steps. In the space of a second he seizes the head of the baby with his right hand and the head of Sura with his left, dashes them together and they split open like egg shells.