At ten minutes to three Jenny Novelli, a nurse, was on her way down Pearl Street to call on her friend Mrs. Knipps, who lived on Colbert Avenue, a dead-end dirt road just beyond Rice & Hutchins on the left. As she passed Schrout’s Bakery she noticed a large curtained touring car abreast of her and going in the same direction scarcely faster than she was walking. The car kept level with her until she reached the cobbler’s shop on the corner. At first she thought the man next to the driver was a friend of hers, William Mooney, but at second glance she realized she was mistaken. The pale driver she scarcely noticed. For sixteen years Lewis Wade had been working in the sole-leather room at Slater & Morrill. Then, late in 1919, the boss had put him in charge of the shed and gasoline pump in front of the lower factory. Any time the company cars needed gas he went out to take care of them. Every afternoon at the same time Hans Behrsin, Mr. Slater’s chauffeur, would come round to fill up Slater’s Marmon sedan, and Wade was always ready for him with the shed door open and the pump unlocked. On this April 15 just before three o’clock, Behrsin dropped by as usual and said he was on his way to the garage and that he would be back in ten minutes. A couple of minutes after three, as Wade was hitching the hose onto the pump, he happened to see a touring car below the factory in front of the little wooden house that belonged to the carpenter at Rice & Hutchins. A man was bending over the hood of the car fixing something. Behrsin pulled up alongside the shed with the gray Marmon and Wade put in about eight gallons of gas. While he was cranking he kept watching the black car until before he knew it the tank had overflowed. Behrsin and he wiped up the overflow, then Behrsin drove off up Pearl Street toward the station. As he passed Rice & Hutchins he saw two men sitting on the pipe fence near the end of the building, their feet on the lower bar. He knew they were strangers, but that was all he noticed about them. From the time Shelley Neal brought in the payroll money, Margaret Mahoney had been dividing it to make up the envelopes for the lower factory. There were almost five hundred separate envelopes to be filled, and dividing the $15,776.51 took her right up to three o’clock, with only about ten minutes off for lunch. After she had sealed the envelopes she packed them in two wooden cases that went inside steel cashboxes with Yale locks. Hardly had she got the locks fastened before Mr. Parmenter and his guard Berardelli, the one everyone called the detective, stood there waiting for them.