Lincoln Wadsworth, the clerk in charge of repairs at Iver Johnson’s, said that according to his records he had received a 38 Harrington & Richardson, the property of Alex Berardelli, on March 20, 1920, to which he had given the repair number 94765. George Fitzemeyer, the gunsmith on the fifth floor, testified that he had been given a revolver with that repair number sometime between the nineteenth and the twenty-second of March. He had repaired it and marked it “H. & R., revolver 32, new hammer, half an hour.” Since he repaired twenty-five or thirty revolvers a day, he could not be sure of the caliber of this particular one. On inspecting Vanzetti’s revolver he said that it had a new hammer. “The firing pin,” he said, “does not show of ever being struck.” Williams, conducting the questioning, neglected to ask him whether the Vanzetti revolver was the one he had repaired. Fitzemeyer’s testimony about the hammer contradicted that of the defense ballistics experts, Burns and Fitzgerald. Burns stated that to the best of his knowledge the hammer was no newer than the rest of the weapon, but admitted that the revolver “bore little indication of being fired much.” Fitzgerald maintained that “the hammer in this revolver has every indication of being as old and used as much as any other part of the pistol.” Thinking it over, John Dever felt that Fitzemeyer, with thirty years’ experience taking revolvers apart, ought to know what he was talking about. According to James Jones, the manager of the Iver Johnson firearms department, the gun with repair number 94765 must have been delivered because it was no longer in the store. When a repaired gun was not called for in a reasonable time the firm’s policy was to lock it away until after stocktaking time in January. If still unclaimed, it was then sold. Iver Johnson kept a record of every sale. There was no record of Berardelli’s revolver being sold. Unfortunately, records of delivery were not made, and there seemed to be no written record that this revolver had been delivered. If the serial number of the missing revolver had been recorded when it was left for repair, it could have been determined at once whether or not Berardelli’s was the one found on Vanzetti—but at this point, as at so many in the case, the direct proof turned as elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp. To Ripley, the jury foreman, Vanzetti’s revolver looked just like the Harrington & Richardson he himself owned. The last time he had used it—to fire some blanks at the Quincy firemen’s muster—he had found three bullets in the cylinder. These he had extracted, putting them in the vest of the suit he had worn to court. At the next recess, when he was downstairs in the dormitory, he searched his vest pockets and found the bullets still there. He later showed them to Hersey and McNamara, and Dever also had a glimpse of them.