One July evening, Bibber Barone, a trigger man associated with the Morelli gang of Providence, pulled up in front of the inn with a Cadillac full of his pals and announced loudly that he had come for Tessie. Madeiros went out on the porch with his revolver and Bibber stood on the grass, his hand in his pocket, staring at him. Mae Boice and Jimmy Weeks, who often used to drop in at the Bluebird, watched them through the open window. Weeks heard Madeiros tell Bibber “that he and his gang had double-crossed him once on the job, and that he might forgive them for that, but if they took the girl he would bump them all, and that it would be sure death.” Bibber wilted back to the Cadillac. By autumn Madeiros had grown tired of Tessie’s olive plumpness and more attentive to the blonde Mae. Once he flashed a roll of thirty hundred-dollar bills in Mae’s face and tried to persuade her to run off with him. This was too much for Barney, who fired his carpenter-bouncer at the point of a revolver. Some time after Madeiros had left the inn he drove back with Weeks and picked a gunfight with Barney in the front yard. Madeiros hit nothing except the house, but as he and Weeks drove off Barney managed to shoot out the taillight of their car. * * * * * Although the Madeiros confession was signed and ready in November 1925, Thompson did not make it public while his death-sentence appeal was pending, since both he and the district attorney felt that if it became known that Madeiros had admitted to a second murder the fact would damage him in any new trial. Then, too, Thompson was optimistic about the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s pending decision on the defense’s appeal from Judge Thayer’s denial of the supplementary motions—he had argued the appeal before Chief Justice Arthur Rugg in the Pemberton Square Court House through three bleak January days. Four months later, on May 12, 1926, the court ruled against the defense on all points. Madeiros had better, if brief, luck. His conviction was reversed by the Supreme Court in March 1926, thus demonstrating to Judge Lummus and other whimsically inclined judges that the formula must not be tampered with. Madeiros went on trial again in May. During most of the proceedings he slumped in his chair with his feet on the rail and his eyes shut as if he were asleep. The jury took less than two hours to find him guilty. On the second day of the Madeiros trial, Thompson drove down to Oak Street in Randolph to locate the house Madeiros had marked on his crude map and see if there was any trace of the boy called Thomas. He found the house more easily than he had expected. It was occupied by a Thomas Driver, who regretfully admitted knowing both Weeks and Madeiros. Weeks, in fact, had been arrested in the house, and the publicity that followed had caused the Drivers much humiliation.