Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/146



116 THE MURDER OF GENERAL FLORES.

youth of sixteen, assisted it is suspected by liis brother, D. Eduardo, and accompanied by a small party, went to the house of two Spanish subjects, the Maurigons, father and son, gargottiers, who kept a guingette, where his father^s assassins had been drinking before the murder, and whom he suspected to have been in the plot. Under pretence of requiring their depositions, D. Segundo led them to the river side, and there directed Sergeant Laprecute to cut their throats. The Spanish Minister indignantly demanded an investigation, but the Oriental Government, after using all decent expressions of horror, not only neglected to arrest the persons inculpated, it even promoted to the rank of colonel the dismissed Major D. Eduardo, and as he had proved himself a man of action, employed him upon a con- fidential mission. Colorados are not yet so cheap that they can be sacrificed for the peccadillo of cutting a " Gringo^s^^ throat.

Ensued new complications. D. Manuel Flores, brother of the murdered General, and some twenty of his friends and relations, died suddenly on Feb. 23 ; and a report that they had been poisoned by the Blancos drove the people to fury. Others explained the accident by the exhalations of a cistern, others by the fact that all had been present at the embalm- ing of General Floras^ corpse. A regular practitioner having demanded 100/., the body, which had become decomposed, was given over to an Italian bird-stuffer; and this artist did his work by sewing the collar of a uniform around the neck, the face being still in a tolerable state of preservation.

General D. Lorenzo Batlle, a moderate Colorado, was constitutionally elected on April 1, and thus the Floristas kept their ascendancy. He was opposed by General D. Gregorio (vulgo Gojo) Suarez, a violent Radical (Conser- vador), personally hostile to Flores : this officer's conduct^