It was an uneasy time, that year after the soldiers returned. In November the savings bank in the neighboring town of Randolph, a few miles west of Braintree, had been held up and robbed. A month later, on the day before Christmas, four men in a touring car had tried to rob the paymaster of the L. Q. White shoe factory in Bridgewater, sixteen miles to the south. An unknown gang had recently stolen several freight-car loads of shoes belonging to Slater & Morrill. Almost every week Neal received a notice from the Boston office warning him to take every precaution, particularly to watch out for suspicious strangers. He now carried his 38-caliber Colt in his pocket with the pocket flap tucked inside so that he could reach for it quickly. South Braintree was the other side of the New York, New Haven & Hartford tracks, at the wrong end of town. Had there been a national-bank branch there, the payroll money would not have had to be sent down by train, but the triangle of factories and narrow streets and workers’ houses was not commercially important enough. Braintree itself, lying ten miles south of Boston, was an undistinguished community of about fifteen thousand inhabitants that one passed through almost absent-mindedly on the old turnpike road to Cape Cod. On Thursday morning, April 15, Neal, in his customary dark suit, derby, and overcoat, waited on the station platform with Art Stevens, one of his expressmen. The 9:18 was late. Neal drew out his gold Waltham on its heavy chain with the Masonic seal. Nine twenty-one. He could hear the wail of the steam-whistle—two long notes, a short, and a long—as the train approached the Braintree crossing. It would take another five minutes to reach South Braintree. His express wagon was backed up to the curb, the driver hunched forward on the seat, his coat collar over his ears. Between the shafts the horse jingled his brasses, stamped, steamed, and tossed his head. Although the sun was four hours up, the air still held an aftermath of winter. Neal’s blunt hands with their hairy knuckles showed red, the diamond set in the thick gold band on his left ring finger reflected the light coldly. A cumulus puff from the invisible train billowed up, blurring the horizon outline of the water towers on Penns Hill, Quincy. Within a minute the engine rounded the curve, growing larger as it moved soundlessly against the wind. Then the whistle echoed again and suddenly the train loomed up on the Union Street crossing by the Victorian brick aggregate of Thayer Academy. The station windows began to vibrate with the sound.