While Dame Torcuata was making these reflections to herself, as she went, with a pan in either hand, toward the fire, cries and hisses of women and children resounded in the street, mingled with other voices in a lower key, saying:  
"Senor Alcalde! Open the door! The city authorities are entering the town with a troop of soldiers!"
 
Jaime Olot became yellower than wax when he heard these words, and clasping his hands together, he said:
 
"Hide me, Senor Alcalde! Otherwise we shall not find the treasure! The authorities have come in search of me!"
 
"In search of you? And why so? Are you a criminal?"
 
"I knew it!" cried Aunt Torcuata. "From that gloomy face no good could come. All this is the doing of Lucifer!"
 
"Quick! quick!" resumed the stranger. Take me out by the back door!"
 
"Very good, but first give me directions where to find the treasure," said
Uncle Hormiga.
 
"Senor Alcalde!" the cry was repeated outside the door, "open! The town is surrounded! It seems it is that man who has been shut up with you for the last hour they are in search of!"
 
"Open to the authorities!" an imperious voice now cried, accompanied by a loud knocking at the door.
 
"There is no help for it!" said the Alcalde, going to open the door, while the stranger tried to escape into the yard by the other door.
 
But the head shepherd and the goat-herd, who were on the alert, cut off his egress, and they and the soldiers, who had now also entered the room, seized and bound him securely, although the renegade displayed in the struggle the strength and agility of a tiger.
 
The constable of the court, who had under his command a clerk and twenty foot-soldiers, meantime told the Alcalde the causes of and reasons for this noisy arrest.
 
"This man," he said, "with whom you have been shut up I don't know why— talking of I don't know what—is the famous Galician, Juan Falgueira, who, fifteen years ago, robbed and murdered a party of gentlemen, whose muleteer he was, in a certain hamlet of Granada, and who escaped from the chapel on the eve of the day appointed for his execution, dressed in the habit of the friar who was administering to him the consolations of religion, and whom he left there half-strangled. The king himself—whom Heaven preserve—received, a fortnight ago, a letter from Ceuta, signed by a Moor named Manos-gordas, saying that Juan Falgueira, after long residence in Oran and other points in Africa, was about to embark for Spain, and that it would be an easy matter to seize him in Aldeire in El Cenet, where it was his intention to purchase a Moorish tower and to............