“Booth answered thus: ‘I am but a cripple, a one-legged man. Withdraw your forces one hundred yards from the door, and I will come. Give me a chance for my life, Captain, I will never be taken alive.’
“Baker—‘We did not come here to fight, but to capture you. I say again, appear, or the barn shall be fired.’
“Then, with a long breath, which could be heard outside, Booth cried in sudden calmness, still invisible, as were to him his enemies:
“‘Well, then, my brave boys, prepare a stretcher for me.’
“There was a pause, broken by low discussions within between Booth and his associate, the former saying, as if in answer to some remonstrance or appeal, ‘Get away from me, you are a damned coward and mean to leave me in my distress; but go! go! I don’t want you to stay. I won’t have you stay.’ Then he shouted aloud:
“‘There’s a man inside who wants to surrender.’...
“At this time, Herold was quite up to the door, within whispering distance of Baker. The latter told him to put out his hands to be handcuffed, at the same time drawing open the door a little distance. Herold thrust forth his hands, when Baker, seizing him, jerked him into the night, and straightway delivered him over to a deputation of cavalrymen. The fellow began to talk of his innocence and plead so noisily that Conger threatened to gag him unless he ceased. Then Booth made his last appeal, in the same clear, unbroken voice:
“‘Captain, give me a chance. Draw off your men and I will fight them singly. I could have killed you six times to-night, but I believe you to be a brave man, and would not murder you. Give a lame man a show.’
“It was too late for parley. All this time Booth’s voice had sounded from the middle of the barn.
“Here he ceased speaking, Colonel Conger, slipping around to the rear, drew some loose straws through a crack and lit a match upon them. They were dry and blazed up in an instant, carrying a sheet of smoke and flame through the parted planks, and heaving in a twinkling a world of light and heat upon the magazine within. The blaze lit up the black recesses of the great barn till every wasp’s nest and cobweb in the roof was luminous. Behind the blaze, with his eye to a crack, Conger saw Wilkes Booth standing upright upon a crutch. He likens him at this instant to his brother Edwin, whom he says he so much resembled that he half believed, for the moment, the whole pursuit to have been a mistake. At the gleam of the fire Wilkes dropped his crutch, and, carbine in both hands, crept up to the spot to espy the incendiary and shoot him dead.... In vain he peered with vengeance in his look; the blaze that made him visible concealed his enemy. A second he turned, glaring at the fire, as if to leap upon it and extinguish it, but it had made such headway that this was a futile impulse, and he dismissed it. As calmly as upon the battlefield a veteran stands amidst the hail of ball and shell and plunging iron, Booth turned to the door, carbine in poise, and the last resolve of death, which we name despair, set on his high, bloodless forehead.