“No one dared touch it, but a thousand fables were current concerning it. It was a constant source of foolish reports and terrors among those who saw it flashing in the sunlight by day, or thought they heard in the depths of the night the metallic sound of its pieces as they struck one another when the wind moved them, with a prolonged and doleful groan.
“Notwithstanding all the stories which were set afloat concerning the armor and which the people of the surrounding region repeated in hushed tones one to another, they were no more than stories, and the only positive result was a constant state of fear that every one tried for his own part to dissimulate, putting, as we say, a brave face on it.
“If the matter had gone no further, no harm would have been done. But the Devil, who apparently was not satisfied with his work, began, no doubt with the permission of God, that so the country might expiate its sins, to take a hand in the game.
“From that moment the tales, which until then had been nothing more than vague rumors without any show of truth, began to assume consistency and to grow from day to day more probable.
“Finally there came nights in which all the village-folk were able to see a strange phenomenon.
“Amid the shadows in the distance, now climbing the steep, twisting paths of the crag of the Segre, now wandering among the ruins of the castle, now seeming to oscillate in the air, mysterious and fantastic lights were seen gliding, crossing, vanishing and reappearing to recede in different directions,—lights whose source no one could explain.
“This was repeated for three or four nights during the space of a month and the perplexed villagers looked in disquietude for the result of those conventicles, for which certainly they were not kept waiting long. Soon three or four homesteads in flames, a number of missing cattle, and the dead bodies of a few travellers, thrown from precipices, alarmed all the region for ten leagues about.
“Now no doubt remained. A band of evildoers were harboring in the dungeons of the castle.
“These desperadoes, who showed themselves at first only very rarely and at definite points of the forest which even to this day extends along the river, finally came to hold almost all the passes of the mountains, to lie in ambush by the roads, to plunder the valleys and to descend like a torrent on the plain where, slaughtering indiscriminately, they did not leave a doll with its head on.
“Assassinations multiplied; young girls disappeared and children were snatched from their cradles despite the lamentations of their mothers to furnish those diabolical feasts at which, it was generally believed, the sacramental vessels stolen from the profaned churches were used as goblets.