Given the ignorant prejudices of villagers, the hopes of plunder awakened by a lawless time and an uncertain government, Concha a prophetess volleying threats and promises--and what wonder is it that in an hour or two a band of a thousand men was pouring through the gates of the great Abbey, clambering over the tiles, and with fierce outcries diving down to the deepest cellars! But from gateway to gateway not a brother was found. All had been warned in time. All had departed--whither no man knew. El Sarria, by his reputation for desperate courage, for a while kept the mob from deeds of violence and spoliation. But still Rollo was not found. Concha, pale of face and with deep circles under her eyes, ran this way and that, her fingers bleeding and bruised. In her despair she flung herself upon one obstacle after another, calling for this door and that to be forced. And strong men followed and did her will without halt or question. But of all others it was the cool practical John Mortimer who hit upon the trail. He remembered how, on their first visit to Montblanch, Rollo himself, at a certain place near the door of the strong-room in which the relics were kept, had declared that he heard a sound like a groan. And there in that very place Concha was driven wild by hearing, she knew not whence, the voice of her lover. It seemed to her that he called her by name. Men ran for crowbars and forehammers. The floor was forced up by mere strength of arm. The dislodging of a heavy stone gave access to an underground passage, and men swarmed down one after the other, El Sarria leading the way, a bar of iron like a weaver's beam in his hand. The searchers found themselves in a strange place. The vaulting which they had broken through so rudely, enabled them to scramble downward amongst great beams and wheels to a raised platform covered with moth-eaten black. The groaning which Concha had heard was stilled, but as El Sarria held up his hand for silence they could hear something scuffling away along the dark passages like rats behind a wainscot. Without regarding for the moment something vague and indefinite which lay stretched out on a strange mechanism of wood, El Sarria darted like a sleuth-hound on the trail up one of the passages into which he had seen a fugitive disappear. It was no long chase. The pursued doubled to the right under a low archway. The dim passage opened suddenly upon a kind of gallery, one side of which was supported on pillars and looked out upon the great gulf of air and space on the verge of which the Monastery was built. The quarry came into view as they reached the sunlight, dazzled and blinking--a smallish lithe man, running and dodging with terror in his eyes. But he was no match for his pursuer, and before he had gained the end of the gallery, the giant's hand closed upon the neck of his enemy. Then Luis Fernandez, knowing his hour, screamed like a rabbit taken in a snare.