J Wilkes Booth Author:Thomas A Jones Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. BOOTH IS PLACED IN MY CHARGE. Saturday evening, just about the time Booth and Herold were setting out from Dr. Mudd's, I was over at my former ... more »residence, near Pope's Creek, attending to some business, when two Federal soldiers rode up and asked me whose boat that was down in the creek. I told them it was mine. "Well," one of them replied, "you had better keep an eye to it. There are suspicious chatacters somewhere in the neighborhood who will be wanting to cross the river, and if you don't look sharp you will lose your boat." "Indeed," I answered, "I will look after it. I would not like to lose it, as it is my fishing boat and the shad are beginning to run." The two soldiers then conversed in an undertone with each other for a few moments when the one who had first spoken turned to me and said: "Have you heard the news friend?" I answered "No." "Then I will tell you," said he. "Our President was assassinated at ten o'clock last night." "Is it possible! " I exclaimed. "Yes," he returned, "and the men who did it came this way." They then rode off and I soon afterward returned home. The next morning, which was Easter Sunday, soon after breakfast, Samuel Cox, Jr., adopted son of my foster-brother, Samuel Cox, came to my house, Huckleberry, and told me his father wanted to see me about getting some seed-corn from me. He added, in an under- one, "Some strangers were at our house last night." Even had I not heard the evening before ofthe assassination of Mr. Lincoln, knowing Cox as I did, I would have been sure he had sent for me to come to him for something of more importance than to talk about the purchase of seed-corn. But putting together the intelligence I had the evening before received from the two soldiers, the fact that strangers had bee...« less