Word of the affair spread rapidly over the town, and as prisoner and escort left the palace they encountered a throng already gathered at the door, held back by the crossed halberds of the sentinels, whom they besieged with questions. As Cristoval stepped out, still breathing heavily and disordered from the struggle, their clamor ceased, and they stared at him in silence, hardly able to believe they beheld the stanch Cristoval in arrest for having turned his sword against his general. "_Insano_—gone mad!" muttered an old arquebusier, and his neighbors agreed to it as the only explanation. Cristoval saw them only vaguely, and scarcely heeded the groups passed on his march across the square. At the doors of the building at its lower end which had been put into service as a prison he halted mechanically, marched again at the command when the doors had been swung open, and only awoke to himself when, having traversed the patio, he was led into one of the rooms opening upon it and felt the oppression of its sudden chill and gloom. The old sergeant of the guard eyed him gravely for a few seconds, then shook his head and retired. The door swung heavily shut, and Cristoval was alone. *CHAPTER XIII* _*Cristoval a Prisoner*_ Cristoval stood near the door. His eyes grew accustomed to the obscurity and travelled over the room and its furnishing; but his mind, occupied by a tumultuous review of the incidents just past, received little impression. In the middle of the room stood a table, and near it two or three stools. Along the wall at the rear was a stone bench, and in a corner a small heap of straw, the bed of some former prisoner. The fragments of a water jar littered the table, with bits of mouldering corn-bread. The low, heavily timbered ceiling, with the great thickness of the walls and the little air from the two small windows, made the atmosphere chill, stifling, and oppressive as that of a cellar.