A voice remarked loudly, "Behold a man who will never speak again." And
another, from the back row of faces, timid and pressing, cried out--
"Why did you kill him, mi colonel?"
"Because he has confessed everything," answered Sotillo, with the
hardihood of desperation. He felt himself cornered. He brazened it out
on the strength of his reputation with very fair success. His hearers
thought him very capable of such an act. They were disposed to believe
his flattering tale. There is no credulity so eager and blind as the
credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the
moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind. Ah! he had
confessed everything, this fractious Jew, this bribon. Good! Then he
was no longer wanted. A sudden dense guffaw was heard from the senior
captain--a big-headed man, with little round eyes and monstrously fat
cheeks which never moved. The old major, tall and fantastically ragged
like a scarecrow, walked round the body of the late Senor Hirsch,
muttering to himself with ineffable complacency that like this there was
no need to guard against any future treacheries of that scoundrel.
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