Manhunt by James L. Swanson Page B

rapidly for its source and found it within seconds, behind the left ear. A neat, round hole, about the diameter of a man’s fingertip, clotted with a plug of wine-red, coagulated blood. Leale’s heart sank.
    In the theatre below, the audience would soon be past control. In a valiant attempt to calm them, the actress Laura Keene marched to the front of the stage, close to the footlights, and begged the crowd to remain calm. “For God’s sake, have presence of mind and keep your places, and all will be well.” The president was not dead, she assured them, without knowing whether that was really true. Then the mayor of the District of Columbia took to the stage to try to keep the crowd under control. An angry voice shouted, “Burn the theatre!” and others echoed him. Yes, burn it down. Others remembered that on Capitol Hill, not more than a fifteen-minute march from Ford’s, the Old Capitol prison was filled with disloyal rebel prisoners. The assassin may have escaped, but they could take their revenge there. And walking in the very streets of Washington this night were ex-Confederate soldiers and officers, some of them still wearing their rebel uniforms. This would be a dangerous night for anyone who came into the proximity of the mob.In a few hours, when the telegraph spread the horrible news to the other great cities of the North, dangerous mobs would take to the streets across the country.
    Dr. Charles Sabin Taft, an army doctor seated on the main floor near the orchestra pit, heard voices shout for “a doctor!” He rose and headed for the stage. His wife begged him to stay: “You sha’n’t go! They’ll kill you too—I know they will!” He got onstage in moments and stood helplessly below the president’s box. The distance from the stage to the balustrade overhead was too far—eleven feet six inches—to jump. It was one thing to leap down from the box—not an easy move even for an athlete like John Wilkes Booth—but it was impossible to jump up to it. There had to be another way up there. Perhaps other men could lift him and launch him into the box. Taft corralled a few of the men standing onstage to form a human catapult. Men bent low and shaped their interlocked fingers into improvised stirrups. Taft dug his boot heels into their cupped palms and fastened his hands to their shoulders for balance. Then, with one rapid, fluid motion the men’s twitching leg, arm, and shoulder muscles exploded in a burst of strength and propelled Taft skyward. On the way up, he shot his arms above his head as high as they could reach, ready to grab anything he could get his hands on. The catapult launched him just high enough. His fingertips grasped wildly for the balustrade, for the framed engraving of George Washington hanging from a thin wire, for the flags, for the bunting—anything that would save him from a plummet to the polished, hardwood stage. His blue army officer’s cape unraveled from his neck and floated back to the stage. Taft swung momentarily from a piece of bunting until others who followed Dr. Leale into the box reached over the side and pulled him up and into the box. But by now Dr. Leale was already attending the president. Under customary medical tradition, Lincoln was Leale’s patient.
    Although Leale feared that Lincoln might already be dead, he made a split-second decision to revive him. To relieve pressure on the brain, he used his fingers to pull the clot from the bullet hole. Then he dropped to his knees, straddled Lincoln, opened the president’s mouth, stucktwo fingers down his throat, pressed hard on the base of his paralyzed tongue, and opened the larynx. Air could now reach Lincoln’s lungs, and to draw life-sustaining oxygen into them, Leale pressed the diaphragm upward and ordered two men to manipulate Lincoln’s arms like levers on a water pump. Then Leale stimulated the apex of the heart by