It was midafternoon before the first juror, Wallace Hersey, a real estate dealer from Weymouth, was picked. By the end of the afternoon only two more had been selected: John Ganley, a grocer, and a machinist, Frank Waugh. Each defendant was allowed forty-four challenges, and that day the defense used up twenty-one. Judge Thayer, exasperated by the delays, held an evening session until ten, when he had to leave to catch the last train back to Boston. It took ten hours and 175 veniremen to get the initial three jurymen. There was, as there usually is in even the most ponderously sustained trial, an occasional lighter moment. At one point a plump sugar dealer from Braintree had the idea of getting himself excused by pretending he was deaf. The courtroom echoed with laughter as Judge Thayer pounced on him. Sacco laughed so hard that tears rolled down his cheeks. Then the courtroom settled down again, the hivelike humming broken only by the squeak of Sheriff Capen’s boots as he walked gingerly across the floor to the upright mace. Behind the judge’s dais the triple-cylindered pendulum of the marble-faced clock ticked away the formal minutes. From time to time the sallow-faced defendants in the cage whispered to one another. Sacco had aged in the year of his arrest. His hair was thinning. That morning was the first time he and Vanzetti had seen each other in eight months. When they met before court opened, they had kissed each other gravely on the cheek. The McAnarney brothers, seated inside the bar enclosure, saw the unhappy pattern of the morning repeated all through the afternoon and evening. It was clear by now to Jerry McAnarney that Moore, for all his reputation, was doing nobody any good, least of all the men in the cage. Jerry was as convinced as ever that the two men were innocent. He had even brought his wife to the jail after the Decoration Day parade to let her talk with Sacco and get her opinion, and she had felt the same way he did. But now, even before the jury had been picked, he had the feeling of the sands slipping from under his feet, of being beyond his depth. The Italians were never going to get a square deal with Moore running things. Jerry could hear Thayer’s edged voice: “Mr. Moore, that may be the way they practice law out West, but not in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!” At the close of the evening session the brothers drove to John McAnarney’s house in Quincy and told him of what was blowing up between Moore and Judge Thayer. They wanted John to get rid of Moore and take charge. John thought it over, and then, even though it was midnight, telephoned William G. Thompson. Thompson was an old Yankee, a lawyer’s lawyer, a lecturer at the Harvard Law School, and whatever he said carried weight in Massachusetts.