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 had 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:
“You are braver when you kill by an explosion, you know.”