"Stop that noise!" said the Deemster. "We know for whom you shed your tears. But you shall yet do more than cry for the man. If a word of yours can send him to the gallows, that word shall yet be spoken."
Dan saw and heard all. The dark place, the judge, the jury, the silent throng, seemed to swim about him. For a moment he struggled with himself, scarcely able to control the impulse to push through and tear the Deemster from his seat. At the next instant, with complete self-possession and strong hold of his passions, he had parted the people in front of him, and was making his way to the table beneath the bench. Dense as the crowd was it seemed to open of itself before him, and only the low rumble of many subdued voices floated faintly in his ear. He was conscious that all eyes were upon him, but most of all that Mona was watching him with looks of pain and fear.
He never felt stronger than at that moment. Long enough he had hesitated, and too often he had been held back, but now his time was come. He stopped in front of the table, and said in a full clear voice, "I am here to surrender—I am guilty."
The Deemster looked down in bewilderment; but the coroner, recovering quickly from his first amazement, bustled up with the air of a constable making a capture, and put the fetters on Dan's wrists.
What happened next was never afterward rightly known to any of the astonished spectators. The Deemster asked the jury for their verdict, and immediately afterward he called on the clerk to prepare the indictment.
"Is it to be for this man only, or for all six?" the clerk asked.
"All six," the Deemster answered.
Then the prisoner spoke again. "Deemster," he said, "the other men are innocent."
"Where are they?"
"I do not know."