Page:John Feoktist Dudikoff - Beasts in Cassocks (1924).djvu/85

 magistrate, who had held a similar position under the Czar's Government, examined me so rigidly as to make the inquest a series of tortures. He summarily announced: "We have found your money." I replied that I was overjoyed at it. Then the "magistrate," prosecutor, ditsrict [sic] attorney, or what you will, asked: "To whom did you give the money?" I carefully described what had happened, but he struck me a violent blow on the face, clenched his fist, and shouted: "You lie! Tell me of your brother's whereabouts!" I answered that I had not heard from my brother for more than a year. To this the district attorney stated: "Your brother is with the White Guards, you took the pane out of the window at night, and handed him the money. Your brother has been arrested. We have found the money on him and confiscated it. You, on the other hand, are sentenced to be shot."

I asked to be confronted with both my guard and my brother who, according to the attorney, had been arrested. My request was denied. Now it became clear to me that I was in the hands of Platon's men who conspired to ruin me. After sentencing me to be shot, for some reason or other they granted me a respite of forty-eight hours for an appeal. I knew that the workmen in the factory who had protested at the time of my arrest to my being taken to the "Che-Ka," would have objected to such a sentence. They believed me to be their comrade, honest and just, and incapable of robbing them of their money. They never expected me to be tried in this manner and so summarily sentenced to death. It was impossible for me to notify them and so I could not secure their help. I was taken hack to prison, and 47½ hours later they came for me and led me out to be shot. I was under the convoy of two soldiers, a sailor and a Chinaman from Manchuria. They brought me to a garden, told me to undress and placed me facing the soldiers, with my back towards a freshly dug trench. The Chinaman ordered me, in broken Russian, to confess my crime, and when I replied: "Your business is to shoot but not to examine," he ran to me and dealt me with the butt of his gun so heavy a blew that I fell to the ground bleeding, and barely escaped being killed. I regained consciousness in the same cell from which I had been led to the execution. I lay there, naked and all covered with blood, on the bare floor.

Soon they came to me, and in spite of the fact that I could not move, they again took me for a hearing. Another magistrate was sitting now. If the soldiers had not supported me under the arms, I