Sacco, as a prisoner still awaiting trial, remained in the Dedham county jail where he had been taken after his preliminary hearing. Unlike the overcrowded Charlestown fortress, the Dedham jail, located on a rural side street, was a relatively pleasant place with fewer than seventy prisoners, most of whom the warden knew by their first name. It was like a well-kept ship, the walls and floors bright with paint, brass shining. The reception room, with its oak benches and bookcases, gave the fugitive impression of a library. There, prisoners could visit with friends and relatives without a guard being present. What was hardest for Sacco to endure was the idleness. From the time the sun rose until it set, there was a gap of hours marked only by meals and the swing of the shadow from east to west across the recreation-room floor. Except for the few trusties who stoked the boilers or worked in the tailor shop or the laundry or did the cooking, there was no way to kill time except by talking or playing cards. Inactivity and restraint chafed Sacco’s spirit. He missed his wife and son; the baby he had never seen he could not get out of his mind. To this man of abundant energy, for whom the day had never been long enough, the tedium of empty hours became a frenzy of frustration. Yet in this early period he never seemed to doubt that he would be eventually set free. Sacco and Vanzetti saw each other seldom during the seven years of their imprisonment. Except for the six weeks of the trial and the final period in the death house, they would meet only briefly when some new motion or empty formality brought them into court. Sometimes they would not meet for a year. Although the interest aroused by the case was still spotty, there was more awareness of the coming trial outside Massachusetts than there was within the state. In Norfolk County it was more or less taken for granted that the suspects were guilty. The Braintree _Observer_ of May 8, 1920, had announced that the two South Braintree “yeggs” had been positively identified. It said nothing more about the case till the trial began. By the time the Thayer Academy boys in their black-and-orange jerseys were holding their autumn football practice behind the Braintree town hall the April robbery was no longer a matter of general conversation. However, Shelley Neal still thought of it each time the payroll came in, delivered now by armed guards, and the girls in the Slater & Morrill offices still liked to gossip about it during the lunch hour. Two days after the Plymouth trial ended, Katzmann appointed Chief Stewart his official investigator. Stewart’s friend Alfred Brouillard, on leave from the State Police, was made his assistant.