Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/207

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GRANTED A STAY
195

swords. Then just a little farther on, near the market, we were received in quite another fashion by a gathering of the scum of the town, who were evidently acting as "supes" for the monarchists, and loosed at us a volley of curses and abuse.

"Death to the revolutionaries! To the gallows with them! To the wall!" came in the hoarse, vodka-moulded voices of the crowd. The cries increased, and stones were even thrown at us, though, as we were ringed with soldiers, none of us was struck. The affair gave us one more proof that the political police had a very definite working arrangement with the guiding monarchists, in that the gendarmes, who had been so energetic a few minutes before in their scattering of the workers, did nothing more than shout a warning to these missile hurlers. But the men in control of the city police, who such a short time before had been under our direction and influence, did not idly pass these doings; for Colonel Zaremba and Captain von Ziegler, expecting a hostile demonstration against us from this gathering of hooligans, had concealed a detachment of mounted police in a courtyard near the market and sent them out to disperse the Black Hundred with whips.

When we finally reached the office of the magistrate, we had a very unpleasant surprise in discovering this judicial person to be none other than the right-hand man of General Ivanoff, Colonel Fiedorenko. The inquiry began. Fiedorenko manipulated it in such a way as to establish to his entire satisfaction the fact that the Central Committee and the Board of Union of Workers had been acting according to the plans and under the orders of the Council of Workers and Soldiers in St. Petersburg, an organization which was most energetically persecuted by the Tsar's Government and which counted