At 4:15 Austin Reed, the railroad-crossing tender at Matfield, a small settlement on the outskirts of West Bridgewater, eight and a half miles southeast of Brockton Heights and twenty-two miles from South Braintree, stepped out of his shanty at the approach of the train from Westdale. As he stood in the middle of the road with the yellow Stop sign in his hand, he saw a touring car racing down the hill from West Bridgewater. He walked toward it holding up his sign. The driver did not seem to want to stop, but finally he pulled up about forty feet away. A man sitting next to the driver leaned out and shouted, “What the hell are you holding us up for?” Then the train passed between them. After it had rumbled by, the car started up over the crossing and the man in the front seat pointed his finger at Reed as if it were a pistol and bellowed again: “What the hell did you hold us up for?” He was only four feet away. The rattling car took the right fork on Matfield Street, then, as if it had made a circle, returned three minutes later on the left fork of Belmont Street and recrossed the track. Reed saw it edge over the hill and watched the cloud of dust that slowly settled behind it. That was the last seen that day of the touring car. * * * * * Parmenter lay propped up on the sofa in the front room of the Colbert house. Scarcely conscious, he managed to whisper that one gunman was dark, short, and stocky and the other short and thin. When the Weymouth medical examiner, Dr. John Chisholm Frazer, arrived at four o’clock there were several other doctors already in the room with Parmenter. Frazer stopped by Berardelli’s body—it had been carried into the Colbert kitchen—only long enough to note that he was dead and that blood was oozing from his back and arms. Shortly after the medical examiner’s arrival, the ambulance from the Quincy City Hospital came for Parmenter. As the paymaster was carried down the steps the onlookers surged in toward the stretcher. They surged in again twenty minutes later when Berardelli’s body was taken away in a wicker basket. After the hearse had disappeared the crowd began to thin. Most of the workers headed home, leaving behind a diminishing core of the young and idle. The long shadow of the afternoon moved along the factory fronts and the sun turned the Slater & Morrill windows orange. A group—mostly boys in corduroy knickers—still stood around the stains in the gravel where Berardelli had fallen. Later, as the sun edged toward the Blue Hills and the light began to fade, the crowd increased again. Workers and their wives strolled down Pearl Street after supper for a second look, voluble witnesses repeated the details, and as the news spread to the neighboring towns the curious and the morbid began to arrive from the compass points—Randolph, Quincy, Holbrook, Weymouth.