CHAP. XIV. unspeakable peace came upon his worn features. Apl. 15, 1865. At twenty-two minutes after seven he died.

Stanton broke the silence by saying, "Now he belongs to the ages." Dr. Gurley kneeled by the bedside and prayed fervently. The widow came in from the adjoining room supported by her son and cast herself with loud outery on the dead body.

CHAPTER XV

THE FATE OF THE ASSASSINS

BOOTH had done his work efficiently.

Doster's

Speech, Pitman,

p. 314.

name was

Lewis Thornton Powell.

His CHAP. XV. principal subordinate, the young Floridian Apl. 14, 1865. called Payne, had acted with equal audacity and cruelty, but not with equally fatal result. He had made a shambles of the residence of the Secretary of State, but among all his mangled victims there was not one killed. At eight o'clock that night he received his final orders from Booth, who placed in his hands a knife and revolver, and a little package His true like a prescription, and taught him his lesson. Payne was a young man, hardly of age, of herculean strength, of very limited mental capacity, blindly devoted to Booth, who had selected him as the fitting instrument of his mad hatred. He obeyed the orders of his fascinating senior as exactly and remorselessly as a steel machine. At precisely the moment when Booth entered the In 1890 the theater, Payne came on horseback to the door of Mr. Seward's residence on Lafayette Square. Dismounting he pretended to be a messenger from the attending physician, with a package of medicine, and demanded immediate access to the sick-room of the Secretary. Mr. Seward had been thrown from his carriage a few days before and his right arm and jaw were fractured. The servant at the

residence

of James G. Blaine, Secretary of State.

Apl. 14, 1865.

CHAP. XV. door tried to prevent Payne from going up the stairs, but he persisted, and the noise the two men made in mounting brought his son Frederick W. Seward out into the hall.

The Secretary had been very restless and had with difficulty at last been composed to sleep. Fearing that this restorative slumber might be broken, Frederick Seward came out to check the intruders. He met Payne at the head of the stairs, and after hearing his story bade him go back, offering himself to take charge of the medicine. Payne seemed for an instant to give up his purpose in the face of this unexpected obstacle, but suddenly turned and rushed furiously upon Frederick Seward, putting a pistol to his head. It missed fire, and he then began beating him on the head with it, tearing his scalp and fracturing his skull. Still struggling, the two came to the Secretary's room and fell together through the door. Frederick Seward soon became unconscious and remained so for several weeks, being perhaps the last man in the civilized world who learned the strange story of the night. The Secretary lay on the farther side of the bed from the door; in the room was his daughter and a soldier-nurse, Sergeant G. F. Robinson. They both sprang up at the noise of the disturbance; Payne struck them right and left out of his way, wounding Robinson with his knife; then rushed to the bed and began striking at the throat of the crippled statesman, inflicting three terrible wounds in his cheek and neck; the Secretary rolled off between the bed and the wall.

Robinson had by this time recovered himself and seized the assassin from behind, trying to pull him

away from the bed. He fought with the quickness CHAP. XV. of a cat, stabbing Robinson twice severely over his Apl. 14, 1865. shoulder, in spite of which the sergeant still held on to him bravely. Colonel Augustus Seward, roused by his sister's screams, came in his nightdress into the room, and seeing the two forms in this deadly grapple thought at first his father was delirious and was struggling with the nurse, but noting in a moment the size and strength of the man, he changed his mind and thought that the sergeant had gone mad and was murdering the Secretary. Nothing but madness was at first thought of anywhere to account for the night's work. He seized Payne, and after a struggle forced him out of the door- the assassin stabbing him repeatedly about the head and face. Payne broke away at last and ran rapidly downstairs, seriously wounding an attendant named Hansell on the way. He reached the door unhurt, leaped upon his horse, and rode leisurely away out Vermont Avenue to the eastern suburb. When surgical aid arrived, the quiet house, ordinarily so decorous and well ordered, the scene of an affectionate home life and an unobtrusive hospitality, looked like a field hospital; five of its inmates were bleeding from ghastly wounds, and two of them- among the highest officials of the nation-it was thought might never see the light of another day; though all providentially recovered.

The assassin left behind him in his flight his bloodstained knife, his revolver,—or rather the fragments of it, for he had beaten it to pieces over the head of Frederick Seward, -and his hat. This last apparently trivial loss cost him and one of his VOL. X.-20

CHAP. XV. fellow-conspirators their lives; for as soon as he Apl. 14, 1865. had left the immediate scene of his crime, his per

ceptions being quickened by a murderer's avenging fears, it occurred to him that the lack of a hat would expose him to suspicion wherever he was seen; so, instead of making good his escape, he abandoned his horse and hid himself for two days in the woods east of Washington. Driven by hunger he at last resolved to return to the city, to the house on H street which had been the headquarters of the conspiracy. He made himself a cap from the sleeve of his woolen shirt, threw over his shoulder a pickax he had found in a trench, and coming into town under cover of the darkness knocked about midnight at Mrs. Surratt's door. As his fate would have it, the house was full of officers who had that moment arrested all the inmates and were about to take them to the office of the provost-marshal. Payne thus fell into the hands of justice, and the utterance of half a dozen words by him and the unhappy woman whose shelter he had sought was the death warrant of both. Being asked by Major Smith to give an account of himself, he said he had been hired by Mrs. Surratt to dig a drain for her. She was called out and asked if she knew him. Not being aware of what he had said, she raised her right hand, with uncalled-for solemnity, and said, "Before God, I do not know him, never saw him, and never hired him." These words, the evidence of a guilty secret shared between them, started a train of evidence which led them both to the scaffold.

Booth was recognized by dozens of people as he stood before the footlights and brandished his drip