It was the snowiest winter in fifty years. The weeks followed into the lengthening afternoons of February. On the sixth a mockingbird was seen by the members of the Bridgewater Bird Club. Five days later a blizzard swirled in from the northeast and the town was snowed under again. In the Superior Court in Brockton Judge Webster Thayer fined a young Brava (the local name for the colored Cape Verde Island Portuguese) two hundred dollars for manslaughter under extenuating circumstances, and asked that the fine be turned over to the victim’s family for funeral expenses. The thaw began on March 19, and the basement of the Bridgewater Central Square Congregational Church was flooded. Then on April 15 a South Braintree paymaster and his guard were killed during a holdup. Having already gone to press, the April 17 edition of the _Independent_ made no mention of the murders. Yet the event had already impinged on Bridgewater. Shortly after the passage of the 1918 Deportation Act, Chief Stewart had assisted the Immigration Service in arresting six Italians charged with spreading literature advocating the overthrow of the government. The six were marked down for deportation and released on bail. Stewart supposed they had all long since been sent back to Italy. But that spring at least one of the six, Ferruccio Coacci, was still living in a section of West Bridgewater called Cochesett. Coacci, sometimes known as Ercole Parrecca, had come to Quincy in 1915 and taken up with a woman named Ersilia Buongarzone. Ersilia had borne him two children, both delivered at the state almshouse in Tewksbury. For a period Coacci was employed at the L. Q. White Company. At the time of his arrest, Joseph Ventola, an anarchist friend from Hyde Park, had posted the thousand-dollar bond, and Coacci was released on condition that he marry Ersilia and support her children. While awaiting his deportation order he worked for Slater & Morrill in South Braintree. Early in April 1920, after receiving his notice to report on the fifteenth at the East Boston Immigration Station, he quit his job. Since the first of the year Coacci had been living in Puffer’s Place, at the corner of Lincoln and South Elm Street, in the empty flatland about a mile from West Bridgewater’s Elm Square. Puffer’s Place was a small, decayed two-story structure with a rust-colored mansard roof and irregularly spaced gables. Once it had been the office of the long-since-defunct Alger Iron Foundry. Then Clarence Puffer, a local handyman, had turned it into a dwelling. Mario Buda, a young Italian who called himself Mike Boda, had rented it early in the winter, and a month or so later Coacci had moved in from Quincy. Ersilia, who was pregnant again, kept house and did the cooking.