The intrepid Shusky repeated his asseveration of Otrepief's imposture. The judge signed to the executioner, who again clapped a heavy hand upon the iron diadem. But suffering only augmented the energy of the heroic Muscovite, who continued, as long as consciousness remained in his tortured head, to denounce the false Czar. At last, when the whole of the forehead and the greater part of the skull were bared to the bone, he fainted and was removed. The terrible crown had been pressed down to his eyes. He was condemned to decapitation; but Otrepief pardoned him upon the scaffold, and, sometime afterwards, was imprudent enough to take him into favour and make him his privy counsellor. Shusky had vowed revenge, and waited only for an opportunity. This was accelerated by Otrepief's fancied security. One morning the false Demetrius was roused by alarm-bells, and, on looking from a window, he beheld the palace surrounded by a host of armed conspirators. The doors were speedily forced; pursued from room to room by overwhelming numbers, his clothes and the doors through which he fled riddled with balls, the Czar at last leaped from a window, and, notwithstanding serious injuries received in falling, he reached a guardhouse occupied by the Strelitz. The post was soon surrounded by an armed and menacing crowd; but the officer commanding declared he would defend his sovereign with his life. "He whom you call your sovereign is a monk who has usurped the crown," said Shusky to the officer. "He is the son of the Czarina Mary," was the reply. "The Czarina herself declares him an impostor." "Show me her written declaration to that effect, and I will give him up; but only on that condition." Shusky ran to the convent where Mary lived in a kind of semi-captivity, told her what was passing,--that the capital was in his power, and that she could not now refuse to proclaim the imposture of the wretch who had compelled her to recognise him as her son. Mary yielded the more easily that her timorous conscience reproached her with the falsehood by which she had confirmed an adventurer in the imperial dignity; she signed and sealed the declaration demanded, and Shusky hastened with it to the officer of Strelitz. Otrepief was given up. Shusky assembled some boyarins and formed a tribunal, of which he himself was president, and before which the Czar, thus rapidly cast down from the throne to which his address and courage had elevated him, was forthwith arraigned. "The hour of expiation is come," said Shusky. "The head you so barbarously mutilated has never ceased to ponder vengeance. Monk Otrepief, confess yourself an impostor, that God, before whom you are about to appear, may have pity on your soul." "I am the Czar Demetrius," replied Otrepief, with much assurance: "it is not the first time that rebellious subjects, led astray by traitors, have dared lay hands on the sacred person of their sovereign; but such crimes never remain unpunished."