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.They were allarrested, taken to Madison, Wisconsin, then held incommunicado fora month as federal agents questioned them.67In fact, Dillinger and his men were long gone.When the shootingstarted—when Inspector Rorer came up firing at the left side of thelodge—Dillinger was the one who returned fire with his machinegun.In those few seconds when the agents took cover, Hamilton, VanMeter, and finally Dillinger had all leaped from the second-story win-dow into a deep snow bank behind the building.Tommy Carroll andBaby Face Nelson were already on the ground, and they ran aroundthe right side of the lodge to join them.68Once out of the lodge, the gang scrabbled down some stairs leadingto the lakeshore, ran along the strand a short way, reentered the woods, then started looking for lights.They did not stay together.TommyCarroll procured a car quickly and got out of harm’s way, thoughlater he bogged down on a logging road and was forced to hitchhikethe rest of the way to St.Paul.Pat Riley had not even been in LittleBohemia during the assault; he and Pat Cherrington had gone outlooking for ammunition.It was their car whose tires the FBI agentsshot out earlier in the night; they drove out of danger.Things weremore complicated for the others.Within minutes after leaping from112 | Dillinger’sWildRidethe building, Dillinger, Hamilton, and Van Meter stumbled acrossanother lodge; some elderly people there directed them to the nearbycabin of a local carpenter, and on pretext of a medical emergency thefugitives took his car and got away smoothly.Of course, the fact thatno roadblocks had been set up helped them immeasurably.69Hours later, with Van Meter at the wheel, the three approachedSt.Paul from the south, assuming that only the northern entrancesto town might be blocked.They were wrong; a local sheriff and hisdeputies recognized the car’s license number from an FBI bulletinand gave chase.The two vehicles hurtled toward St.Paul, guns blaz-ing.Dillinger broke out the back window and blasted away with hismachine gun, while the cops returned fire.As they neared the city,Van Meter managed a sharp right turn onto a secluded road and losthis pursuers, but not before Red Hamilton received a mortal gun-shot wound in his lower back.They abandoned their bullet-riddledcar, flagged down another, and took it at gunpoint from its owner.Dillinger helped Hamilton, in agony and bleeding heavily, into theirnew ride and headed back to Chicago.70Meanwhile the car that Baby Face Nelson had commandeered brokedown on him.He walked twenty miles through the woods and endedup at the home of Ollie and Maggie Catfish near Lac Du Flambeau.Difficult as it is to imagine the sharply dressed little thug and theelderly Chippewa couple together, Nelson, claiming to be a game war-den, stayed with them for several days.Finally, growing worried ortired, he forced Ollie at gunpoint on a trek to find a car.Nelson stole a Plymouth and made the old man show him the way to State Highway70.Nelson let Catfish out along the road, then drove down the lengthof Wisconsin and finally back toward Chicago.He went straight toLouis Cernocky’s tavern in Fox River Grove, which, remarkably, stillwas not under surveillance, though several snitches had told the FBIthat Cernocky’s place was a safe house for the Dillinger gang.71The Little Bohemia fiasco only reinforced Dillinger’s fame.Fordays the media was saturated with the story.“Dillinger ReportedSurrounded” was the block-letter headline across the St.Louis Globe-Democrat; “End of Bloody Trail in Sight,” the Meriden (Connecticut) Record agreed.As that hope grew faint, other newspapers hyped the bloody deeds of the outlaws
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