The Golden Sabre. Jon Cleary

was silence for a moment, then Natasha Mihalovna chomped her gums and suddenly screamed, ‘Sit down, you old fool! The trial goes on!’

      There was another moment’s silence. Cabell looked out at the crowd, realized with a sickening sudden emptiness that Delyanov was alone. Then someone clapped. The clapping spread through the crowd, hesitatingly, never loud, the hands hollow so that the sound, too, was hollow. It was an answer; but not the answer Delyanov had expected. He looked around him, bewildered; suddenly, after sixty years, he, too, was a stranger again. Abruptly he sat down, looked as if every one of his years had all at once fallen in on him. Jesus, Cabell thought, they’ve just executed him!

      The prosecutor, given back the floor (or the roadway, for he stood in the middle of it), put the case against the prisoners. The foreigners had no proof that they were who they said they were; the children were half-Russian, as admitted by the American, but they did not look nor sound even half-worker. Compare them with the children of our village …