In Dedham Vanzetti was to tell a different story about his revolver than he had told at the Brockton police station. When he took the stand he admitted he had lied before, claiming that he had wanted to protect the friends from whom he had bought the gun. His first story—that he had bought it five years before his arrest for eighteen dollars was false; he had really owned it only two or three months, and he had bought it from Luigi Falzini, an East Boston marble cutter, who in turn had bought it not long before from Ricardo Orciani. Instead of paying eighteen dollars for it, Vanzetti had paid five; he had never fired it; the bullets now in the revolver were there when he bought it. The reason he had bought it was to protect himself, for often when he went to buy fish he carried eighty or a hundred dollars in his pocket, and it was “a bad time, it was many crimes, many holdups, many robberies.” He did not remember telling Katzmann in Brockton that he had bought a box of cartridges or that he had shot off all but six on the beach at Plymouth. If he had said this, it was not so. Falzini took the stand after Vanzetti and recognized the revolver as his because of rust spots and a deep scratch behind the trigger guard that he had noticed when he bought it. In the time he owned it, he had never fired it or taken it apart. For his next corroborating witness Moore brought Rexford Slater from Dexter, Maine. Before settling in Maine, Slater had worked in the same Norwood foundry as Orciani. He had bought a Harrington & Richardson revolver from his mother-in-law, a Mrs. Mogridge, who happened to bring it with her when she came from Maine on a visit. He had fired it several times, once killing a cat, and in 1919 had sold it to Orciani. He recognized it on the stand by the way the nickel plating had worn off the end of the barrel and over the cylinder. The holster—picked up by the police in searching Vanzetti’s room—he also recognized from the brass knob on it, a tear in the back, and a small side-strap. Slater was at first an argumentative witness. When Katzmann asked if another revolver of the same kind fired under the same conditions might not show the same wear, he denied that any conditions could ever be the same. As Katzmann kept pressing him, Slater’s confidence began to wilt. The district attorney asked him if he was not just guessing, if he was sure that Vanzetti’s revolver was the one that had belonged to him. “I am sure the same scars as on the gun I sold, and exactly the same,” Slater answered in syntactical confusion. Katzmann persisted. “I did not ask you that. Are you sure that is the same gun?” Slater delayed his answer so long that Judge Thayer finally rapped out: “Answer the question!” “I am not,” he admitted.