A wave of relief passed through Judd. He had Artie back.

Would he see Artie tomorrow? In the yard?

The next morning when they were marched into the jail yard, Judd went up to Artie at once, his hand extended. “We got into this together, let’s go through with it together,” he said. “I’m sorry if I did anything that might strain our friendship.”

Artie blinked, then put out his hand, too, while over his face came that roguish, college-boy grin.

As Wilk and Ferdinand Feldscher came into the consultation cell, the boys rose, Artie with a sheepish look toward Feldscher, and Judd to address Wilk with undisguised adulation. “I am a great admirer of yours. May I say I consider you one of the greatest minds of our time?”

Well, he would try to be of help, Wilk said. But he did not see much hope. What had made them talk so much!

Raising his head, Judd said he guessed he had wanted to show off.

“All right. Now that’s finished with. Remarks like this thing about finding a friendly judge-” Wilk shook his head, eyeing Judd sadly. “You didn’t really say that?”

Judd declared that he couldn’t recall, exactly.

“Henceforth,” Feldscher admonished, “no matter what is asked, by reporters or anybody, you reply, ‘I must respectfully decline to answer upon advice of counsel’. Got that?”

“I must respectfully decline…” they parroted.

Feldscher glanced from one to the other. “Have they questioned you about other crimes?”

Artie’s face twitched.

“The papers are full of stuff. They claim you did everything from that gland atrocity to the killing of Cock Robin.”

“Have you got the papers?” Artie asked eagerly.

Feldscher shook his head. “Everybody is finding taped chisels all over Chicago.” His eyes had not left Artie’s face.

Artie returned his gaze unblinkingly. “I must respectfully decline to answer upon advice of counsel.”

For the time being they let it stand that way.

It was Wilk’s telephone now that rang incessantly with anonymous and obscene threats. A hundred and ten killers saved from the gallows? He himself would hang from a street lamp before he could add these two to his list!

And at midnight, flaming up beneath his windows, was the burning cross.

When news of it came, I rushed to the Midway, to see only the charred remnants, as of a huge box kite. Fire engines were pulling away. It was the Ku Klux Klan. The first burning cross in Chicago. No, no one had seen hooded white figures. Some said a truck had stopped, a dozen men had set up the ready cross, touched matches to it, and driven off.

For Wilk? I was dazed. What had this crime to do with the K.K.K.? All I knew were the general things. K.K.K. was something to be joked about, yet vaguely menacing. All those men in their white sheets, their regalia, were subjects for Mencken’s jokes in The Smart Set. They were symbols of stupidity. And they had seemed rather distant from Chicago. Wasn’t it a Southern thing that had started after the Civil war, against Negroes? The nearest that it had ever come to Chicago was some town in Indiana. A burning cross had been reported there. And they would come at night and grab somebody – some minister involved in a scandal, perhaps – they would grab him and take him to a wood and whip him. They were not only against Negroes. Catholics and Jews, too.

And Wilk. An atheist. A defender of Jews.

Then a remark of my father’s came to my mind. When I had called home, on Sunday, his only remark about the case had been, “One thing is lucky in this terrible affair, Sid. It’s lucky it was a Jewish boy they picked.” My father, with his one yardstick. What will it do to the Jews?

It was to take me a long while to perceive the inverted, subterranean way in which there was a meaning to their all being Jewish. The immediate result of the cross-burning was a police guard set around Jonathan Wilk. Despite his protests.

Then the defence called a press conference. Wilk was sitting with his back to the windows as we filed in, but he got up at once and assumed his celebrated Lincolnesque stoop; his coat hung loosely open, and his left thumb was automatically hooked under his braces. He waved us in, the ageing speckled skin of his hand transparent in a sunny.

We were handed copies of a prepared statement. The families pledged themselves in no way to make use of their wealth to influence justice. Lawyers’ fees would be determined by the Bar Association. The families felt that the boys should be permanently removed from society; however, they hoped that their lives would be saved.

Did that mean an insane asylum? we asked. What would the defence be?

First, said Edgar Feldscher, the defence would try to assemble the facts.

Mike Prager snapped, “Hasn’t everything already been found out?”

The outward facts, yes. But a team of the very best alienists would make a study to determine the inward facts.

“Then you are going to plead insanity?”

The plea, he repeated smilingly, would depend on the study. It was to be purely scientific. Indeed, the defence still held open to Mr. Horn the offer for a joint mental study.

We took the defence offer to Horn. He laughed. “I’ve got my own alienists, the best in the business. Old Wilk is trying to pull a deal. First, a joint examination. Then he’ll offer a guilty plea. Oh, no, you can tell old Jonathan the Great that I’m not playing. I’ve got an airtight hanging case and those boys are going to swing.”

Had there been feelers from the defence? Was there a chance of a deal on a guilty plea before the Chief Justice?

“You know what the chances would be if I was still sitting up there!” Horn said ominously. He was reminding us that before running for State’s Attorney, he had himself occupied the post of Chief Justice of the Criminal Court. He was putting Judge Matthewson on notice.

The formal arraignment was to take place on the following morning, and late into the night we hovered near the Wilk apartment, still held by Horn’s angry hint that there might be a plea of guilty instead of a great show trial.

Edgar Feldscher had returned from Atlantic City, bringing two of his alienists. Willie Weiss was there too, hurrying in and out of various rooms, and from the doorway I managed to get his attention. He came out and walked around the block with me, talking incessantly. He was going to work with the defence! There was Dr. Hugh Allwin, a very advanced man who had just come from Vienna with the very latest techniques! And with him was Dr. Eli Storrs, a brilliant psychologist. “They’re really going to do a job!” he said. “Nothing like this has ever been done before. Complete psychological and physiological studies, the latest gland stuff. Wilk’s also got Dr. Vincenti, the best endocrine man alive!” The boys would virtually be taken apart, to see what made them tick.

But upstairs, I gathered, the insanity strategy was in question. Precedent alone, straight legal precedent, presented to a judge, might be the soundest approach, for no minor in Chicago had ever been hanged on a guilty plea.

On the morning of the arraignment we still did not know how they would plead. Then, as we were leaving for court, Reese beckoned to Tom. Somebody named Al Capone, the owner of a speak-easy called the Four Deuces, had just been picked up for shooting a top gangster named Joe Howard. A new kind of cold-blooded killing. The car had simply swept past Joe Howard on Clark Street, and he had been shot full of holes.

Tom hurried to police headquarters and I went on alone to cover the arraignment of the boys.