Frederick Parmenter was in his middle forties, a full-faced man with a short mustache. The solidness of his body, his slightly sagging features and thinning brown hair made him seem older. Margaret Mahoney and the other girls in the office looked forward to his weekly visits. He liked to joke and pretend to make dates with them, though it was only in fun, for he had been married for years and did not play around. He was always very careful of his dress. That day he wore a white shirt with black and pink stripes and a new brown felt hat. Before he left he kidded a bit with the bookkeepers, Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine. He said he would take his pay now while there was still some money, and Margaret Gabney, the assistant bookkeeper, told him he had better, for there might not be any tomorrow. Then he took one of the cashboxes by the handle, and the detective took the other. The detective was just another Italian who never said anything. Margaret Mahoney remembered afterward how Parmenter stood for a moment in the doorway and then how the stairs creaked as he and the detective walked down. It was a few minutes past three. Outside the main entrance of the Hampton House, Parmenter, with Berardelli behind him, met Albert Frantello from the lower factory. Frantello said he was on his way to the office to get some cardboard tags. The paymaster and his guard walked on out of the shadow of the Hampton House. Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine watched them for some minutes from their window on the second floor. Parmenter, without an overcoat, kept to the outside of the gravel walk and the detective, his overcoat buttoned up, walked a little way behind him. Just before they reached the crossing Parmenter shifted the cashbox from his left to his right hand. Fifteen feet beyond him the gate-tender was out washing a window of his shack. From the cutting room on the third floor, Mark Carrigan, also looking out a window, kept his eye on the paymaster and the detective with their boxes as they passed the cobbler’s shop on the corner and went on toward the railroad-crossing sign. Just beyond the crossing, they stopped to talk with a man coming uphill from the other direction. Then they went on down, behind the high board fence by the water tower. The first-floor windows of the lower Slater & Morrill factory were open, and Minnie Kennedy and Louise Hayes at their workbench noticed a touring car parked by the side of the street only about ten feet from them. A slight fair-haired man in a blue suit was fussing with the motor, lifting one side of the hood and then the other. Finally he stood by the front mudguard and lit a cigarette. A sickly young man he seemed, but not bad-looking. While he was standing there with a screwdriver in his hand, Thomas Treacy drove up with a wagonload of coal for Slater & Morrill, noticed the man’s light hair, and remembered that he had seen the same car with another man in front of the railroad station early that morning.