Thompson knew that his entering this by-now notorious case would arouse a great deal of hostility in State Street legal circles, and he persuaded his friend of many years, Arthur Dehon Hill, to come in with him so that, as he explained, he would have an associate he could talk with more frankly than he could with Moore. Hill, a lawyer who had once been corporation counsel of the City of Boston, was a more integral State Street figure than Thompson, who—like Judge Thayer—had been brought up in Worcester and was a Bostonian merely by attrition. Although fortuitously born in Paris, Hill was an inbred Bostonian whose perspective was limited by the familiar triangle of Beacon Hill, the Harvard Yard, and the North Shore. Like so many Boston lawyers who moved securely in their dimly lit world of irrevocable trusts, he was cadaverous—as if his blood stream had by some subtle osmosis absorbed the dried leather of a century’s _Massachusetts Reports_. Even as a Harvard undergraduate he looked as if he had never been young. Yet this secure, aloof lawyer who appeared so typical of his caste was not wholly typical. There was something more to him, a quality of _fiat justitia_ that went beyond Beacon Hill. In the 1912 Bull Moose campaign he had come out for Theodore Roosevelt, a rejection of the Boston norm. When Thompson first asked him to enter the Sacco-Vanzetti case, he was reluctant. Although he had a poor opinion of the garrulous Thayer he thought well of Katzmann, whom he had known for a number of years. Hill joined the defense on March 15 feeling, as he later explained, “What do I care about these draft-dodgers who were skulking in Mexico when their countrymen were fighting for the very life of the land? But I do care for the honor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” Thompson would in time come to consider the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti as his own. For Hill, who would appear as counsel in the last tumultuous weeks, it was a case and not a cause, and he the advocate rather than the partisan. CHAPTER THIRTEEN POST-TRIAL: II Just before Thompson and Hill entered the case Sacco went on a hunger strike. A year and a half had elapsed since his conviction, and he announced that he would continue to fast until the court ruled on his fate. Much of the delay during 1922 had resulted from the additional time granted Moore to follow up clues that he hoped might lead to the real criminals. In the autumn Judge Thayer underwent an operation, causing a further delay.