Craves drove from the bank along Summer Street to the square, then turned down Broad Street—divided in the middle by a single streetcar track—moving at a cautious ten miles an hour because of the ice on the road. A streetcar moving in the same direction had just stopped at the corner of Hale Street, seventy-five yards away. At the same moment a curtained touring car swung over the tracks and pulled up on the corner, its wheels on the sidewalk. Three men jumped out and dog-trotted toward the oncoming truck. The man in the lead, bareheaded, with a dark mustache and wearing a long black coat, carried a shotgun. The two behind him held pistols. Graves had first noticed the touring car—a Hudson, he thought it was—while he was passing Harlow’s blacksmith shop. He watched the men get out and start running, but it was not until the mustached man knelt and took aim that he realized he was in for a holdup. Yanking on the gas lever, he veered the truck across the tracks. Bowles reached for his revolver. When the truck was some twenty-five yards away the mustached man fired both barrels. A few pellets rattled against the truck’s metal body without doing any damage. One of the men with pistols, standing eight feet behind the man with the shotgun, exchanged random shots with Bowles until the streetcar came between them. Then the mustached man dashed across the street and fired again at the slithering truck. Cox, from his seat on the cashbox, saw the kneeling figure and the smoke from the discharged shotgun, “everything like the snap of a camera.” As the truck skidded, Graves lost control of the wheel. Bowles grabbed it out of his hands. Wavering from one side of the street to the other, the truck finally crashed against a telephone pole, smashing headlights and radiator. In the meantime the three gunmen had scurried back to their car with its waiting driver and spun out of sight down Hale Street in the direction of the normal school. When Frank (“Slip”) Harding, an auto-parts salesman on his way to Bassett’s Garage just across from the corner of Hale Street, first saw the men carrying guns, he thought it was some kind of movie stunt. He was only four feet away as they began firing and he watched them, too astonished to move. Then within seconds they had run back to their car and driven off. Harding later described the car as a black Hudson Six with the license number 01173C. Dr. John Murphy, a young general practitioner with his house and office at 76 Broad Street, was getting dressed when he heard the shots. He looked out his window just in time to glimpse the touring car moving away. By the time he reached the street, about the only thing he could see was the litter of glass where the truck was rammed against the pole. Then he noticed a spent shotgun shell in the gutter. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.