"Leave me, I say," the boy resumed, "or I swear by the blessed souls of purgatory, that evil will befall you!" The vaquero sneered, and whirled his lasso round his head. "Be warned, Rafaël," he said; "for the last time, will you surrender?" "No! a thousand times no!" the boy cried, passionately. "By the grace of God, then!" said the vaquero. The lasso whizzed and flew through the air. But a strange thing happened at the same moment. Rafaël stopped his horse short, as if it had been changed into a block of granite; and, springing from the saddle, he bounded like a tiger upon the giant, whom the shock bore down upon the sand; and before anybody could oppose him, he plunged into his throat the knife which all Mexicans wear in their belts. A long stream of blood spouted into the face of the boy, the vaquero writhed about for a few seconds, and then remained motionless. He was dead! The crowd uttered a cry of horror and fear. 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." "Ah! ah! ah!" the judge said, with a secret satisfaction. "But no," he went on, "that is not possible; Rafaël is but sixteen at most; he would never have been so foolish as to quarrel with Cornejo, who, by only grasping his arm, could have disabled him."