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AT FOUR O'CLOCK, AN ESCAPED CONVICT bought a pair of Bushnell binoculars just up Main Street at York Arms Company, one of the businesses whose windows were smashed on March 28. He drove back to finish setting up a surveillance post. The convict had driven from Atlanta, where the newspapers said King was leaving for a march in Memphis, arriving late the previous night. This day, reading front-page news that King was staying at the Lorraine, and perhaps hearing radio reports that specified Room 306, he had located and studied the motel until an hour ago, when he rented a room for $8.50 per week in Bessie Brewer's flophouse next door to Fire Station Number 2. With the seven-power Bushnells, he could read room numbers on the motel doors 70 yards distant, and the same strength on his Redfield scope would make human figures seem only 30 ft. away. The scope was mounted on a .30-06 Remington Gamemaster, which was engineered so that its 150-grain slug would lose less than .01 inch in altitude and reach the motel balcony with 2,370 pounds of knockdown power--enough to drop a rhinoceros. However, the odd angle of an occluding building next door meant the convict could fire the long rifle only by leaning out his window. To avoid that, he must wait until he sighted his target from the room, then run with the rifle down the hallway to the common bathroom, find it unoccupied, and hope King stayed long enough on the balcony to get a clear shot from a rear window above the bathtub.
About five o'clock, when Andrew Young returned from his courtroom testimony to find a general bull session in visiting Kentucky state senator Georgia Davis Powers' Room 201, King greeted him with playful fury by wrestling him to the floor between the two beds. Abernathy, SCLC member Hosea Williams, Bernard Lee and King's brother A.D. King joined in a wild tickling punishment of Young for failure to keep "our Leader" informed all day, which turned into a free-for-all pillow fight, with King sometimes squaring off against A.D. as in childhood. Once the hysteria subsided, Young said he thought the hearing went pretty well. Chauncey Eskridge walked in from a lawyers' conference with Judge Bailey Brown and said the judge would permit SCLC to lead Monday's march under the restrictions King and Lawson desired: a prescribed route, no weapons and narrow ranks to give the marshals wide space on the flanks to keep the spectators away. This relief started a fresh buzz of determination for weekend preparations. They should all get ready for dinner at the home of Reverend Billy Kyles, a well-known Memphis minister, King said, and Officer Richmond, a Memphis policeman keeping King under surveillance, noted through binoculars at 5:40 his brisk walk with Abernathy upstairs to their Room 306.