prisoner just executed. Not only the rope and the ring-bolt had been
torn away, but part of the beam had splintered.

"There is nothing more," replied Rouletabille.

He was mistaken. Something occurred to him, an idea flashed so suddenly
that he became white as his shirt, and had to lean on the arm of the
gentleman of the Neva in order to accompany him.

The door was open. All the men who had voted his death filed out in
gloomy silence. The gentleman of the Neva, who seemed charged with the
last offices for the prisoner, pushed him gently out into the court.

It was vast, and surrounded by a high board wall; some small buildings,
with closed doors, stood to right and left. A high chimney, partially
demolished, rose from one corner. Rouletabille decided the whole place
was part of some old abandoned mill. Above his head the sky was pale as
a winding sheet. A thunderous, intermittent, rhythmical noise appraised
him that he could not be far from the sea.

He had plenty of time to note all these things, for they had stopped
the march to execution a moment and had made him sit down in the open
courtyard on an old box. A few steps away from him under the shed where
he certainly was going to be hanged, a man got upon a stool (the stool
that would serve Rouletabille a few moments later) with his arm raised,
and drove with a few blows of a mallet a great ring-bolt into a beam
above his head.

The reporter's eyes, which had not lost their habit of taking everything
in, rested again on a coarse canvas sack that lay on the ground. The
young man felt a slight tremor, for he saw quickly that the sack swathed
a human form. He turned his head away, but only to confront another
empty sack that was intended for him. Then he closed his eyes. The sound
of music came from somewhere outside, notes of the balalaika. He said to
himself, "Well, we certainly are in Finland"; for he knew that, if the
guzla is Russian the balalaika certainly is Finnish. It is a kind of
accordeon that the peasants pick plaintively in the doorways of their
toubas. He had seen and heard them the afternoon that he went to
Pergalovo, and also a little further away, on the Viborg line. He
pictured to himself the ruined structure where he now found himself shut
in with the revolutionary tribunal, as it must appear from the outside
to passers-by; unsinister, like many others near it, sheltering under
its decaying roof a few homes of humble workers, resting now as the