窗櫺巷道 They Learned Our Doors and Lanes
他四人在我家住了半月，將我家門戶牆垣、窗櫺巷道，俱看熟了，財動人心，所以乘此夜雨，復到我家，既劫去財物，又害了父親，此情何毒！待天明到府裡遞失狀，坐名告他。」寇棟道：「失狀如何寫？」寇梁道：「就依母親之言。」他四人在我家住了半月，将我家门户墙垣、窗櫺巷道，俱看熟了，财动人心，所以乘此夜雨，复到我家，既劫去财物，又害了父亲，此情何毒！待天明到府里递失状，坐名告他。」寇栋道：「失状如何写？」寇梁道：「就依母亲之言。」
逐句解 Line by line
"The four of them lodged in our house for half a month. They had our gates and walls, our window lattices and inner lanes, all learned by heart. Wealth stirs the heart of a man, and so they took advantage of this night's rain to come back to our house, and having robbed us of our goods, they murdered our father besides. How vicious a thing!"
巷道 — the inner lanes. A walled house of this size was not one building but several courtyards with alleys running between them, and the word means those alleys. It appears exactly once in the whole novel, and the first character is 巷 xiàng, a lane, which is what it means at all eight of its places in the book. 財動人心 — wealth stirs the heart of a man — is the son's explanation of the motive, and it is a proverb, not an observation. He is reaching for a ready-made phrase because he has no evidence. It also happens to be an accurate description of what the actual robbers said about the actual house. The argument he builds is the strongest one available: the guests had means, they had opportunity, and a fortnight to survey the place. It is entirely reasonable and entirely wrong.
"At daybreak we will go to the prefecture and lodge a complaint of robbery, naming them, and bring a charge against them."
失狀 is the formal document — a written statement of goods lost by theft, the thing you filed to start a criminal case. The Ming had a working paper system for this and the book assumes its readers know how it went. 坐名告他 is the phrase that turns a robbery into this chapter. 坐名 means to name names — to accuse specified people rather than persons unknown. Up to this sentence the family have been victims of a crime. From this sentence they are prosecutors, and four innocent men are defendants.
Kou Dong said, "How shall the complaint be written?" Kou Liang said, "Just as our mother has said."
Two short exchanges and the paperwork is settled. The younger brother asks the practical question, the elder gives the fatal answer. 就依母親之言 — just as our mother has said. It sounds like deference and it is, but it is also the moment where nobody checks anything. The written charge is about to be a transcription of a story invented an hour ago by a woman who was under a bed, and the reason it goes onto paper unexamined is filial respect.
The son's case against the pilgrims is the strongest part of this chapter and it is worth taking seriously. Four strangers lodged in the house for a fortnight. They had the run of the place and could have mapped it. They left in the morning and the house was robbed that night by men who came straight to it without scouting. Motive, opportunity, and a suspicious coincidence of timing. A modern prosecutor would open with it.
What he cannot know is that the actual gang made exactly the same argument about the same house on the same night, and reached it from the opposite end. They did not need to survey the compound because the send-off procession told them everything: here is a rich man, and here is his money leaving the house in public. The reader has watched them say so. The son is reconstructing a plan that really was made, by people he has never seen.
The decision to name names is the hinge. 坐名告他 converts a misfortune into a prosecution, and it happens in four characters, unopposed, in a room where everyone is grieving and nobody is thinking. The rest of the chapter — the arrest, the gaol, the beating, the trip to the underworld — all of it follows from a document that two brothers agreed to write without asking a single question about it.