Killing Lincoln - Bill O'Reilly [95]
But now Herold is just as exhausted as Booth. He didn’t endure the same extreme adrenaline spike last night, if only because he didn’t kill anyone. But he experienced a definite and sustained rush as he galloped over the Navy Yard Bridge, then along the dangerous darkened roads of Maryland. He’s had time to think and to plan, and he knows that constant forward movement is the key to their survival. Otherwise, Herold has no doubt that the cavalry will be on their trail in no time.
Clearly, they cannot stay at Dr. Mudd’s any longer. Just before dusk, Herold rouses Booth and helps him down the stairs and up into the saddle. Herold guides them south through the countryside, aiming for the Zekiah Swamp, with its quicksand bogs and dense stands of oldgrowth hardwoods. The few trails that exist are almost impossible to see in the dark, and the pair are soon lost and frustrated. They turn back toward Mudd’s farm but remain out of sight, plotting their next move.
The next twelve hours bring an enduring awareness that they are neither safe nor welcome anywhere.
Easter Sunday dawns hard and bleak. Herold and Booth are camped in a stand of pines a quarter mile off the main road. A cold front is racing across Maryland, and they shiver in the damp swampy air, just a few short miles from the final obstacle to their escape into Virginia, the Potomac River. Booth isn’t wearing a boot on his injured leg, and his foot and ankle are in pain and quite cold from walking on swampy ground in the thin shoes he took from Mudd. Yet Herold doesn’t dare make a fire. Beside him, Booth is curled up in the fetal position, head resting on one hand. Each man clutches his revolver as a stiff wind bends the towering pines. The last sympathizer they visited, the wealthy owner of forty slaves in this still-lawless region, promised to send a man to ferry them across to safety. The rescue signal will be a soft whistle, a pause, and then another soft whistle.
So now they wait. Hour after brutally cold hour, they wonder who will deliver them from this hell. Booth says little, except to cry out in pain or mutter something about not being taken alive. He still has some fight in him. Now and then they hear the jangle of bridles from the nearby road. And all the while, a gnawing little voice in Herold’s gut tells him that they have been betrayed—that the whistle, when it comes, will be their only warning before United States cavalry confirm their position and ride in with guns blazing.
Late Sunday afternoon they hear the first whistle. Then a second. Confederate sympathizer Thomas Jones calls out to them in a low voice, announcing that he is walking into their camp.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
MONDAY, APRIL 17, 1865
MARYLAND SWAMPS
There is nothing dashing or heroic about the man who has come to save the lives of Booth and Herold. Thomas Jones is a broken man, a forty-four-year-old smuggler who has done time in prison, outlived his wife, and lost his home. He now earns his living by transporting everyone from secret agents to diplomats across the Potomac River to the South. On average, he makes the crossing three times a night. He is so skilled that northern newspapers secretly enlisted his help to get their product into the South during the war. A favorite technique employed by the silver-haired and low-key Jones is to begin his first crossing just before dusk, when the angle of the sun makes it impossible for sentries on the opposite shore to see small craft on the water. It is a brazen and brilliant tactic. Clearly, if any man can get Booth and Herold to safety, it’s Thomas Jones.
On his first visit to the