Manhunt (34 page)

At Bryantown, Mudd repeated to Colonel Wells the same story that he told Lieutenant Lovett several times. The men were strangers to him: “I never saw either of the parties before, nor can I conceive of who sent them to my house.” The young man said his name was “Henson,” and the injured one said his was “Tyson” or “Tyser,” Mudd could not remember which. Wells picked up Mudd's furtive scent right off. He asked if the injured stranger looked like Booth. No, replied Mudd. Wells found it odd that Mudd failed to recognize a man—especially one so celebrated—that he had met before, and not briefly. After all, Mudd and Booth had met at church in broad daylight, they had shopped for horses together, they had visited the blacksmith, and Booth had slept at Mudd's home.

But Mudd protested that he never got a good look at the stranger: “I did not see his face at all,” he said. The man “had a heavy shawl on all the
time,” and he raised it to conceal the lower half of his face. Even when the man got into bed, “he had very little to say,” and he kept “his cloak thrown around him and seemed inclined to sleep.”

A photograph issued to one of the manhunters,
defaced with sentiments of the moment.

In that case, wondered Wells, how was Mudd able to provide such an accurate description of the stranger? The doctor's report was remarkably well observed: “He had a pretty full forehead and his skin was fair. He was very pale when I saw him, and appeared as if accustomed to in-door rather than outdoor life.” Moreover, the man had a moustache and a “long, heavy beard”; it was even longer than Colonel Wells's own substantial one, Mudd asserted. But unfortunately, Mudd apologized, he could not determine whether it was a natural or artificial beard. Finally, Mudd confirmed, the man did shave off the moustache after he was given the razor. The doctor even described the qualities of the stranger's hair. And he saw the eyes. All very interesting details about a face Mudd claimed he never saw.

Yes, Mudd admitted, he had met Booth before, but he swore that the injured man was not Lincoln's assassin. And, he added, not only did the man in the photo not look like the stranger, he did not even look like John Wilkes Booth! “A photograph of Booth was … shown me by a detective, but I did not observe any resemblance between the two men, though I must say that I have very often been shown likenesses of intimate friends, and failed to recognize them by their pictures.”

One of the detectives interrupted the interrogation to give Wells a piece of evidence no one had told him about—John Wilkes Booth's boot, fresh from Mudd's farmhouse. Wells stared at the boot and, frustrated, feigning concern for the doctor's well-being, issued a warning: “I said it seemed to me that he was concealing the facts, and that I did not know whether he understood that that was the strongest evidence of his guilt that could be produced at that time, and that might endanger his safety.”

It was now midafternoon. Wells had been at Mudd for three hours straight and still could not break him. “He did not seem unwilling to answer a direct question that I asked; but I discovered almost immediately,
that, unless I did ask the direct question, important facts were omitted.” Wells pressed on relentlessly. His strategy was not to threaten the doctor overtly, but to keep him talking for several hours until he wore him down. The doctor offered gossipy, trivial details of no value to the manhunters: “They paid me $25.00 for my services, which they rather pressed me to accept. I told them a small fee would answer.” Although the men stayed at his place for fifteen hours, Mudd claimed that he hardly spoke to them at all: “I had very little conversation with these men during the day.”

Wells wondered if Mudd had noticed Booth's prominent tattoo, the initials “JWB” inked boldly between the thumb and forefinger of the actor's left hand. Cleverly, the doctor denied seeing the hand at all: “My examination was quite short … I did not observe his hand to see whether it was small or large.” Or, implicitly, whether it was tattooed. Mudd repeated his tale about sending Booth and Herold off in the direction of Piney Chapel: “Before they left they inquired the way to Rev. Mr. Wil-mer's … he is regarded by neighbors as a Union man.” In any event Mudd did not see which way they went: “I did not see the parties when they left in the afternoon … I did not go out.” And, by the way, “I have always called myself a Union man, though I have never voted with the administration party.”

Mudd cautioned Wells that the pale stranger was well armed, but said nothing about Davey's Spencer carbine: “The injured man had a belt with two revolvers in it concealed under his clothing, which I discovered when he got into bed after having his wound dressed.” It was late in the afternoon. Wells had questioned Dr. Mudd—and the doctor had parried him—for close to six hours. The colonel produced another carte-de-visite photograph of Lincoln's assassin and told Mudd to look at it carefully. Do you or do you not recognize him as the stranger? Wells demanded. No, that was not the man. On second thought, Mudd admitted it. He said that he realized it just now. Yes, the stranger was John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln's assassin
had
taken refuge at his farm. And, either
intentionally or unwittingly, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd had helped him escape.

As Colonel Wells brought the interview to a close around 6:00 P.M. on Friday, April 21, he mentioned a little formality that he would take care of. To avoid confusion, and to make things clear, he would write out a statement of Mudd's testimony. The doctor was free to go. But would he please return to Bryantown on Saturday to sign it? As Mudd departed, Colonel Henry Wells spoke ominously: “One of the strongest circumstances against you is, that you have failed to give early information, as you might have done, in this matter.”

Mudd, exhausted by the morning's questioning by Lieutenant Lovett, followed by six more hours with Colonel Wells, rode home. He had accomplished his mission. Tonight, in a few hours, Booth and Herold would land safely in Virginia, far from the reach of Colonel Wells, Lieutenant Lovett and his detectives, and Lieutenant Dana and the Thirteenth New York Cavalry. They had lost the assassin's scent and would never pick it up again. Unless other manhunters picked up Booth's trail soon and continued the chase, he would escape. Soon, unless somebody stopped him, John Wilkes Booth would vanish into the Deep South. Once that happened, Union forces would never find him. Mudd had played a large role in helping Booth escape Maryland. Soon, however, he would pay a terrible price for his lies.

O
NCE
J
OHN
W
ILKES
B
OOTH ATTEMPTED TO CROSS THE
P
O
tomac on Thursday the twentieth, and finally reached Virginia early on Sunday the twenty-third, the sanctuary of Thomas Jones's Huckleberry did not survive long undisturbed. Union detectives suspected that a man of Jones's reputation must know something about Booth's escape and they arrested him. But they had no evidence, and, true to his character, he volunteered nothing. The troops confined Jones at the Bryantown Tavern, locking him up in a second-floor, back bedroom. Like the Surratt's tavern, the Bryantown establishment served as a way station for mysterious, wartime Confederate intrigues.

The detectives didn't know it, but they had, in a sense, conveyed Thomas Jones to a scene of the crime. At this very tavern, in a first-floor parlor below the bedroom that served as the river ghost's ersatz jail, John Wilkes Booth met with Samuel Mudd and rebel agent Thomas Harbin when the actor plotted his madcap scheme to kidnap Abraham Lincoln. The detectives also ensnared Captain Cox in their dragnet. Oswell Swann, who guided the fugitives to Rich Hill early on Easter morning, Sunday, April 16, gave information against the captain. Cox insisted that when the two strangers came to his door, he dismissed them and ordered them on their way. But Swann disputed him and swore that Cox invited the criminals into his home, where they spent several hours. The detectives locked up Cox with Jones and posted two guards outside their door. Before they went to sleep on the floor, their heads resting on their saddles, Cox turned to his good friend and experienced secret agent for advice. “What shall I do, Tom?” he whispered in the dark. “Stick to what you have said,” counseled Jones, “and admit nothing else.”

The detectives, frustrated at their lack of progress, tried to trick Jones into confessing by loitering in the yard below his bedroom window and talking loudly about his forthcoming and imminent hanging. Still Jones would not talk. Even when transferred to the dreaded Old Capitol prison, site of his former, devastating incarceration, and current home to John T. Ford, Junius Brutus Booth, John Sleeper Clarke, and many others ensnared by the manhunt, he refused to provide any information about John Wilkes Booth. During the wagon ride from Bryantown to Washington, an unsubtle government agent had tried, once again, to loosen his captive's tongue with alcohol. Detective Franklin genially offered a bottle of whiskey, which Jones pretended to drink. When the officer saw that his prisoner refused to get drunk, he cursed him all the way to the capital.

The detectives failed to realize it, but when they arrested Jones, they also captured an eyewitness who possessed intimate knowledge of how
he helped Booth and Herold. But they could never make her talk. Jones was forced to leave her behind in Bryantown, but he laughed at the detectives' ignorance about their valuable prize—his horse: “This mare was the same one Booth had ridden from the pines to the river that memorable … night. She was a flea-bitten gray, named Kit. Had her complicity been known, what an object of interest she would have been.” Instead, Kit lived out the rest of her days in quiet anonymity.

Jones knew he possessed the trump card that he could play to outbluff the detectives: not a single eyewitness could place him in the company of Booth and Herold. Whenever he had traveled to and from the pine thicket, he always rode alone. When he had guided the assassins to the boat at Dent's Meadow, he did it alone, and no one saw him coming or going. As long as Samuel Cox and the captain's son kept faith and did not implicate him, the detectives could not make a case against him. Booth and Herold were the only ones who could betray Jones. But Booth had vowed to die before being taken alive. Eventually, Jones reasoned, the government would have to release him.

And that is exactly what happened. Freed in the aftermath of the manhunt, Thomas A. Jones passed from memory and, eventually, from history as a forgotten footnote, merely one of the hundreds of men and women arrested, never charged, and soon released during the great manhunt of April 1865. Captain Cox, too, won his liberty. Oswell Swann was the only witness against him. Cox's loyal servant girl, Mary, denounced Oswell as a liar and swore that Booth never entered the house. Jones guessed correctly that the two conflicting black witnesses canceled out each other: “Mary's positive and persistent declaration that Booth had not entered the house—unshaken by threats or offered bribes—saved Cox's life when it hung in the balance.” When the ever-observant Jones, peering out from a window of the Old Capitol, spotted Swann leaving the prison, heading for the Navy Yard Bridge and Maryland beyond, he knew that Cox was safe. Jones informed his relieved friend, “You have nothing more to fear. The only witness against you has been dismissed and is going home.”