Monkey settled the Tang monk in the seat of honour, and the three of them stood with their weapons and barked, "Small-time thieves! How many are there in your band? How many years have you been in this trade? How much have you taken in your robberies? Have you ever killed anybody? Is this a first offence, or a second, or a third?"

上首 — the seat of honour, the upper place. Tripitaka is put where a presiding magistrate sits. Five questions in a fixed order, and it is the order a real interrogation used: strength of the gang, length of career, value taken, deaths, previous convictions. Monkey has heard this done before, or the book has. ⚠ 可曾 — have you ever. The second character here means ever, and the chain mistakes it for the surname that is written the same way. Curiously it only goes wrong inside this one frame: the five other places this chapter uses the character, in not yet and never did, all come out right unaided.

The robbers opened their mouths and said, "Your honours, spare our lives." Monkey said, "Stop howling. Out with it truthfully."

從實供來 — out with it truthfully. Again the courtroom word: state it under questioning. Monkey is running this exactly as a magistrate would, down to the vocabulary. 爺爺饒命 — your honours, spare our lives. The robbers switch instantly into the same cringing form of address the Kou brothers used before the prefect. Everybody in this chapter knows how to talk to a court.

The robbers said, "Old master, we are not long-practised thieves. We are all of us sons of decent families. It was only through our own worthlessness — drinking and gambling, whoring and idling — that we ran through the whole of our fathers' and grandfathers' estates. We had been at nothing for a long while and had no money left to spend."

好人家子弟 — sons of decent families. The book gave us this already, in the third sentence of the chapter, and it is now confirmed out of their own mouths. 不才 — worthlessness. It is a formal word, the sort a man uses of himself in a letter, and it sits oddly and rather touchingly in a robber's confession on a roadside. Notice they are not asking for sympathy. Every clause is an admission. This is what an honest confession sounds like, and it is worth comparing with the sworn complaint two thousand characters back, which was false in one respect and true in all the others.

"We had it on inquiry that Squire Kou's household inside the walls of Tongtai was enormously rich, so yesterday we banded together, and that evening, under cover of the dark and the rain, we went off to rob it."

Their account matches the narrator's exactly — the inquiry, the wealth, the band, the night, the rain. Nothing is added and nothing is left out. ⚠ It also matches the Kou son's sworn complaint almost word for word. Both describe men who found out the house was rich and went there under cover of a storm. The only difference between the true account and the false one is which men are being described, and that difference is invisible in the language.

"What we robbed was some gold and silver and clothing, and we were just splitting the takings in a fold of the hills north of the road here, when we suddenly saw your honours coming. Some among us recognised you as the ones Squire Kou saw off, and reckoned you were bound to have goods about you."

⚠ 分贓 — splitting the takings. The first character is the verb for dividing, which is the commoner of its two readings. The other belongs to a share as a thing you get one of, and that is what it means in the robbers' own earlier phrase about putting the horse in the pot. Two words of one character in one chapter, and the chain gets each of them wrong in the other one's direction. Neither is anywhere else in the novel. 認得 — recognised. The verb and the character after it have fused into one word for knowing somebody by sight, and the second half keeps its full weight.