One man, white-faced, bareheaded, rushed from the doorway of the theatre crying:—
“Stop the assassin! Stop him! It was Wilkes Booth. Don’t let him get away!”
But those who had seen the flying horseman disappear down the long moonlit vista of F Street, knew that the assassin had already made his escape.
Men and women, with horror-stricken faces, were now pouring from the entrance to the play-house. The street was filling up with a jostling, questioning, gesticulating crowd. “How did it happen?”—“Who did it?”—“Why was it done?”—“Where is the murderer?”—“Catch him!”—“Hang him!” Men demanded information, and action as well. Two soldiers in full uniform, with side-arms, hurled themselves out into the roadway, through the crowd, and up toward F Street. Some one called a boy and told him to run to the White House as though his life were the forfeit for delay, and tell Robert Lincoln to come.
And then, suddenly, a hush fell upon the crowd. It was known that they were bringing the President down. The space about the doorway was cleared, and out into the lamplight came men bearing the long, limp body of Abraham Lincoln. At the sidewalk they hesitated and stopped. What should they do with him? There was no carriage there. And if there had been, it was too long and rough a journey to the White House to take a dying man. Diagonally across the street, on the high front porch of a plain three-story dwelling-house, a young man stood. He had come from his bed-chamber to learn the cause of the disturbance, and seeing the limp body of the President brought from the door of the theatre, and that the bearers were in doubt as to what they should do, he called out across the street, over the heads of the multitude:—
“Bring him in here! Bring him in here!”
And the men who were carrying the body, having no plan of their own, knowing nothing better to do, bore their unconscious burden across the way, up the steep and winding stairs to the porch, through the modest doorway and down the narrow hall into a small plain sleeping-room at the end, and laid the President of the United States on a bed where a soldier of the ranks, home on furlough, had slept for many nights.
And it was there that the President died. Not in the White House with its stately halls and ornate rooms, not where his labor had been done and his cares had weighed him down, not where his hours of anguish had been spent and his tears of pity had been shed; but here, in this humble home, like the homes he had loved and lived in before the nation called him for its chief, it was here, in the gray of the next morning, that he died. And Stanton, his great War Secretary, standing at his bedside when the last breath left the mortal body, Stanton who had known him for many years, who had in turn denounced him, ridiculed him, criticised him, honored him, and loved him, turned in that moment to the awe-stricken onlookers at the last scene and said: “Now he is with the ages.”
Among those lining the pathway across the street along which the President’s body was borne, dripping blood as it passed, stood Rhett Bannister and his son. For one moment, as the moonlight fell on the gray face, already stamped with the seal of death, they saw him. His long arms hung loosely at his sides, his eyes were closed, his countenance showed no mark of suffering, save that some one, holding his wounded head, had inadvertently smeared his cheek with blood. They never forgot that sight. They never could forget it. Many and many a time, in the stillness of midnight, in the light and noise of noonday, no matter where or when, the vision of that face they both had known and loved, with its closed eyes and tangled hair, and with the blood-splash on the cheek, came back to them, with its never-ending shock and sorrow.
After the President’s body had passed, and the crowd closed in again, and men took second thought and began to realize the horror of the hour, and to rave against the assassin, and those who might have influenced him, and while women, pale-faced and unbonneted, wept and wrung their hands, the soldiers came and cleared the theatre, and drove the people from the street; and thenceforward, until the dead body of the Chief Magistrate had been borne from the humble house where he died, no one without authority was permitted to pass that way.