The driver must have soon realized he was off course, for ten minutes later George Chisholm, a road laborer working on Main Street, a stone’s throw from Oak, saw the car beating up north with flaring curtains, hurtling by him so fast he thought the tires were coming off. It turned right into Oak Street and continued a quarter of a mile east, bearing down Orchard until it again arrived at the junction. The driver stopped, hesitated, then swung the car into the yard of the Hewins house on the corner just across from the Farmers. Mabel Hewins was standing on her porch when the swarthy man in the front seat leaned out and asked her the way to Providence. She told him to follow Oak Street to Chestnut across North Main and keep going. He grunted, reversed the car jerkily, and started back the way he had come. She could see both men in the front seat clearly, but not the others. Not quite two miles farther, a mile beyond Tower Hill where Chestnut Street merges with the Stoughton Post Road, John Lloyd and Wilson Dorr, working in a sandpit, saw the car jouncing south along the road that was “all hills and hollows and ruts.” Dorr noticed that the glass was missing from the back window. On the sharp gradient of Tucker Hill leading into Stoughton it overtook Francis Clark and Elmer Pool in their bakery wagon, veered out, and continued on the left-hand side of the road and over the crest. Clark, too, noticed the oblong gap in the back of the cloth top and told Pool to copy the license plate. All Pool could spot was 49. The car disappeared south in the isolation of the old turnpike and was not glimpsed again until it reached the outskirts of Brockton at a quarter to four. A high school girl, Julia Kelliher, saw it coming down very fast over the hill from Brockton Heights, churning the dust behind it, the curtains fluttering in the wind. As it went over a bump she saw something tossed up in the back seat behind the curtains. There were two men in front. After the car passed she tried to take down the license number. She could made out an 83 at the end and a 9 and a 7, and these she wrote in the sand beside the road.