The South Braintree murders had drifted into the background. Gradually the district attorney’s questions led back to them. If Sacco and his friends had been so alarmed by Salsedo’s death, why did they wait three days before doing anything about collecting the incriminating papers? Why had Sacco said they were going out to pick up books and papers on the night of their arrest while Vanzetti had testified they were merely going to make arrangements to pick them up? “Probably I mistake or probably Vanzetti is right,” Sacco replied. Katzmann quietly asked a few irrelevant questions about the mackinaw Orciani was wearing. Then suddenly Sacco felt the knife at his throat: “Did you take that revolver off the person of Alessandro Berardelli when he lay on the sidewalk in front of the Rice and Hutchins factory?” “No, sir.” Defendant and prosecutor stared long and silently at each other in the quiet courtroom. There were, Katzmann reminded Sacco, the lies he had told the night of his arrest. The district attorney led him over them. It was a lie, Sacco admitted, that he had bought his Colt in the North End. He had really bought it at a store in Milford in 1917. He had lied, too, about buying a new box of cartridges. The truth was that cartridges were hard to come by during the war and he had bought an odd lot of them in a partially filled box somewhere on Hanover Street. Katzmann at once wanted to know if the fact that he later learned there were four different kinds of cartridges had anything to do with his changing his story. If he had told the truth about that box, would it have helped to give away the names and addresses of his friends who had radical literature? Following each logical advantage, the district attorney pinned Sacco down to admitting he could give no reason for such lying that had anything to do with the names and addresses of anarchists. Sacco still insisted that when he had gone out on May 5 with the Colt tucked in his belt he had forgotten about it. He was used to carrying it while on his watchman’s rounds, he said, though it was true he had not been a watchman during the winter of 1920. Sometimes when he went into Boston and came back late on the train he carried it. “Wasn’t it a pretty unusual thing for you to carry the gun?” Katzmann thrust at him. “Well,” Sacco parried, “it is, but men have to defend themselves. In the country you don’t know what you need.”[11]