第92章

She immediately testified in Russian against the man, who protested until they compelled him to be silent.She drew from her pocket papers which were read aloud, and which appeared to crush the accused.He fell back onto his seat.He shivered.He hid his head in his hands, and Rouletabille saw the hands tremble.The man kept that position while the other witnesses were heard, their testimony arousing murmurs of indignation that were quickly checked.

Annouchka had gone to take her place with the others against the wall, in the shadows which more and more invaded the room, at this ending of a lugubrious day.Two windows reaching to the floor let a wan light creep with difficulty through their dirty panes, making a vague twilight in the room.Soon nothing could be seen of the motionless figures against the wall, much as the faces fade in the frescoes from which the centuries have effaced the colors in the depths of orthodox convents.

Now someone from the depths of the shadow and the appalling silence read something; the verdict, doubtless.

The voice ceased.

Then some of the figures detached themselves from the wall and advanced.

The man who crouched near Rouletabille rose in a savage bound and cried out rapidly, wild words, supplicating words, menacing words.

And then - nothing more but strangling gasps.The figures that had moved out from the wall had clutched his throat.

The reporter said, "It is cowardly."

Annouchka's voice, low, from the depths of shadow, replied, "It is just."But Rouletabille was satisfied with having said that, for he had proved to himself that he could still speak.His emotion had been such, since they had pushed him into the center of this sinister and expeditious revolutionary assembly of justice, that he thought of nothing but the terror of not being able to speak to them, to say something to them, no matter what, which would prove to them that he had no fear.Well, that was over.He had not failed to say, "That is cowardly."And he crossed his arms.But he soon bad to turn away his head in order not to see the use the table was put to that stood in the center of the room, where it had seemed to serve no purpose.

They had lifted the man, still struggling, up onto the little table.

They placed a rope about his neck.Then one of the "judges," one of the blond young men, who seemed no older than Rouletabille, climbed on the table and slipped the other end of the rope through a great ring-bolt that projected from a beam of the ceiling.During this time the man struggled futilely, and his death-rattle rose at last though the continued noise of his resistance and its overcoming.

But his last breath came with so violent a shake of the body that the whole death-apparatus, rope and ring-bolt, separated from the ceiling, and rolled to the ground with the dead man.

Rouletabille uttered a cry of horror."You are assassins!" he cried.But was the man surely dead? It was this that the pale figures with the yellow hair set themselves to make sure of.He was.Then they brought two sacks and the dead man was slipped into one of them.

Rouletabille said to them: