She turned the sixth bullet toward her own breast, but not before a crowd, mostly soldiers, closed round her, tore the revolver from her hand, and began to beat her. They tore her clothing from her body. A Cossack officer seized her by the plait of her hair--brown hair, dark and wavy--and threw her forcibly to the ground. Consciousness left her. Eye-witnesses told how the officer then grasped one of her ankles and dragged her along the ground to a carriage in which she was conveyed to a near-by gendarmerie. In this temporary prison she was in charge of two men, the same Cossack officer, Zhdanov, who had dragged her away, and a police officer of the rank of _priestoff_, named Abramoff. These two men remained with their prisoner and began drinking heavily of vodka. Then they stripped their prisoner, stark naked, and even at the sight of her bruised and bleeding body did not stop their hellish inquisition of sensuous debauchery and torture. They scarred her quivering flesh with the lighted ends of their cigarettes. They caressed and they pounded her by turns. Immediately afterward all of these revolting details were given to the world, yet no steps were taken by the officials, or by the government, to in any way reprove or censure these two men--one an officer of the police, the other an army officer. A writer in a prominent Moscow paper dared to speak out against this shame, and declared fearlessly that this girl had deliberately and thoughtfully staked her life against the life of a tyrant in order that her people might be saved from his administration of blood and suffering. For this temerity the paper was at once suppressed, and not only the writer, but the whole editorial staff, was forced to flee into hiding. Marie Spiradonova was an assassin, therefore the military court decreed that she should die. Such was the situation when I visited Tamboff. The outcry which went up against taking the life of this girl eventually became so loud that her sentence was commuted to twenty years at hard labor. But at the time of my visit she was still under sentence of death. Before presenting my request for an interview to any official in Tamboff, I decided to cultivate the acquaintance of the governor of the province, to discover what manner of man I had to deal with. With this in view, I called at the official residence the morning after my arrival in the city, and in due time was presented to his excellency, Governor Xanugievitch. For an hour we discussed the agrarian situation, the famine, the Duma elections, and other topics pertinent to the hour, but never a word of the real object of my visit. The Governor proved most affable and hospitable, and he extended a cordial invitation to me to dine with him.