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Rorer opened the dead man’s wallet and lifted out his driver’s license. It was then that the three FBI supervisors learned that the man they had just killed was a thirty-five-year-old worker at a nearby federal work camp named Eugene Boisneau.

They waited. Other than the wounded “John,” whom they could still see staggering inside the lodge, there was no sign of life in the building. Even though they had apparently killed an innocent man, Purvis tried to put it from his mind. Dillinger and his gang were trapped inside the lodge; eventually they would have to make a break for it. For the moment, Purvis and Clegg decided against storming the place. There weren’t enough bulletproof vests, and they had no tear-gas guns at all. Purvis had inexplicably failed to bring Chicago’s. Clegg’s were being brought by Werner Hanni and the other St. Paul agents, who were still en route. The minutes ticked by. All around the lodge, agents hunched behind trees, blowing on their hands for warmth.

An hour passed. Then, around eleven o’clock, a new set of headlights appeared in the driveway. It was an ambulance from the federal work camp, Camp Mercer. Purvis was surprised. No one had called for it. The camp doctor, a man named S. X. Roberts, stepped out of the ambulance and told Purvis he had received a call that a worker named John Morris had been wounded. Purvis realized Morris must be the “John” who had retreated into the lodge. This was getting worse by the minute.

When the ambulance drove up, another man emerged from the woods. His name was John Hoffman; he was a gas station attendant. Hoffman had been the third man in the Chevrolet coupe, the one Agent Reinecke had shot at in the woods. He had a gunshot wound in his right arm and glass cuts all over his face. Together Hoffman and Dr. Roberts called for John Morris to come out of the lodge. A moment later he did so. To Purvis’s surprise, Morris was followed by three men, who walked out with their hands up. It was Emil Wanatka, his bartender, and the busboy. Wanatka said Dillinger and his men were still inside the lodge, hiding in an upstairs bedroom on the left side of the building.

Word passed through the agents in the trees: they had the Dillinger Gang trapped. That was the good news. In whispers the bad news passed from man to man, that someone, apparently a civilian, had been killed in the Chevrolet. No one took the news harder than Carter Baum, the handsome twenty-nine-year-old who had fired the fatal shots. Baum was sitting in one of the FBI cars, brooding and trying to keep warm. An agent named Ken McIntire sat with him. “I think there’s a man in that car,” McIntire said at one point, “and I think he is dead.”

“Certainly he is,” Baum said. “I killed him.” McIntire tried to assuage Baum’s guilt. Several agents had fired at the car, McIntire said. It was dark. He couldn’t be certain he had killed the man. He should forget about it. But Baum couldn’t forget. He had killed an innocent man. Touching the submachine gun in his lap, Baum said, “I can never shoot this gun again.”21

Outside, Purvis and Clegg continued debating whether to storm the lodge. Again they decided to wait for Werner Hanni and the tear-gas equipment: with the building surrounded, Dillinger wasn’t going anywhere. Purvis collared Agent Jay Newman and told him to take one of the FBI cars and drive to Birchwood Lodge, phone the Rhinelander airport, and leave a message for Hanni to hurry forward the moment he arrived. Newman, a Mormon laypreacher, noticed Carter Baum’s plight and asked to take him along. Maybe they could talk. Purvis agreed.

Newman drove Baum to Birchwood Lodge, where he phoned an agent left at Rhinelander and relayed the message. When Newman finished his call, the operator told him he had just heard something about a Packard being stolen in town, in Manitowish. Newman, worried that a member of Dillinger’s gang might be escaping, took Agent Baum and drove back past Little Bohemia and on into the town, where they spotted a constable