(3 of 3)
Gathering Tension. On the third day of the siege the convicts agreed to negotiate with a seven-man citizens' committee. At the first, tense meeting, between midnight and 3 a.m., the convicts were polite but adamant. They faced the com mittee across a table, set up with a pad and pencil as if for a board-of-directors meeting. They served coffee to the committeemen, talked at length of their hopeless futures, the rigid Massachusetts penal code, the miserable living conditions in Cherry Hill (one of the committeemen, Editor Erwin D. Canham of the Christian Science Monitor, was shut for a few min utes in one of the granite solitary cells —to see how it felt). At the second meeting, the following afternoon, the tensions mounted. The committee agreed to try to help the convicts, but made no deals.
At last, after six hours of negotiating, the grim men decided to surrender and face the consequences (up to 20 added years). "Until almost the precise moment when [the four] pulled their guns from their dungarees pockets, slipped out the clips or bullets, and tossed them on the table before us," wrote Canham, "we did not know whether the men would choose tragedy or hope."