I still wander aside from my narrative to ask a question or two of society.  I have a right so to wander and so to question, for in a little while they are going to take me out and do this thing to me.  If the neck of the victim be broken by the alleged shrewd arrangement of knot and noose, and by the alleged shrewd calculation of the weight of the victim and the length of slack, then why do they manacle the arms of the victim?  Society, as a whole, is unable to answer this question.  But I know why; so does any amateur who ever engaged in a lynching bee and saw the victim throw up his hands, clutch the rope, and ease the throttle of the noose about his neck so that he might breathe.

Another question I will ask of the smug, cotton-wooled member of society, whose soul has never strayed to the red hells.  Why do they put the black cap over the head and the face of the victim ere they drop him through the trap?  Please remember that in a short while they will put that black cap over my head.  So I have a right to ask.  Do they, your hang-dogs, O smug citizen, do these your hang-dogs fear to gaze upon the facial horror of the horror they perpetrate for you and ours and at your behest?

Please remember that I am not asking this question in the twelve-hundredth year after Christ, nor in the time of Christ, nor in the twelve-hundredth year before Christ.  I, who am to be hanged this year, the nineteen-hundred-and-thirteenth after Christ, ask these questions of you who are assumably Christ’s followers, of you whose hang-dogs are going to take me out and hide my face under a black cloth because they dare not look upon the horror they do to me while I yet live.

And now back to the situation in the dungeons.  When the last guard departed and the outer door clanged shut, all the forty beaten, disappointed men began to talk and ask questions.  But, almost immediately, roaring like a bull in order to be heard, Skysail Jack, a giant sailor of a lifer, ordered silence while a census could be taken.  The dungeons were full, and dungeon by dungeon, in order of dungeons, shouted out its quota to the roll-call.  Thus, every dungeon was accounted for as occupied by trusted convicts, so that there was no opportunity for a stool to be hidden away and listening.

Of me, only, were the convicts dubious, for I was the one man who had not been in the plot.  They put me through a searching examination.  I could but tell them how I had just emerged from dungeon and jacket in the morning, and without rhyme or reason, so far as I could discover, had been put back in the dungeon after being out only several hours.  My record as an incorrigible was in my favour, and soon they began to talk.

As I lay there and listened, for the first time I learned of the break that had been a-hatching.  “Who had squealed?” was their one quest, and throughout the night the quest was pursued.  The quest for Cecil Winwood was vain, and the suspicion against him was general.