Page:Stories by Foreign Authors (Spanish).djvu/172

168 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 Orán 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 Cenét, where it was his intention to purchase a Moorish tower and to devote himself to mining. At the same time a communication was received by the government from the Spanish Consul in Tetuan, stating that a Moorish woman called Zama had