catered to Confederates. City police and members of the U.S. Armyâs Provost Marshalâs detail knew son John as a Rebel courier and an associate of Booth. Theyâd visited Maryâs place at two A.M . on April 15 and sheâd put them off with lies, but two days later, one of Maryâs servants told investigators of a meeting held beneath her roof the night Lincoln was shot, including Booth and others. On their second visit, April 17, the officers searched high and low, discovering photographs of Booth and Jefferson Davis, a pistol, percussion caps, and a bullet mold. While they were hauling Mary out, one Lewis Powell arrived, introducing himself as a workman on Maryâs payroll. Confused, she denied knowing him, and he joined her in jail, soon identified as the man who had wreaked bloody havoc at Secretary Sewardâs home three nights earlier.
On April 20, another suspected conspirator, George Atzerodt, had been run to ground at a farm outside Germantown, Maryland, twenty-odd miles northwest of Washington. According to police, Booth had assigned Atzerodt to murder Vice President Johnson, and while Atzerodt had booked a room at Johnsonâs hotel, he then lost his nerve and fled, leaving a pistol and a Bowie knife beneath his pillow for police to find. Now, he was under lock and key with Powell and Mary Surratt, aboard the monitor USS
Saugus
, anchored at Washingtonâs Navy Yard.
Booth, David Herold, and John Surratt, meanwhile, were all in the wind. But Ryder thought their lead was narrowing.
Today, authorities knew that Booth had crossed the Navy Yard Bridge into Maryland, on horseback, within thirty minutes of the shooting at Fordâs Theatre. Herold made the same crossing, about an hour later, and rendezvoused with Booth before proceeding to Surrattsville, in Prince Georgeâs County. There, theyâd retrieved stockpiled weapons and other supplies, then ridden to Bryantown, stopping at the home of a local physician, Dr. Samuel Mudd. Mudd, in turn, had splinted Boothâs right legâbroken sometime during his escapeâand fashioned him a pair of crutches. Booth and Herold had spent another day with Mudd, then hired a local man as their guide to the Rich Hill home of another Confederate sympathizer, Col. Samuel Cox. Fearing arrest himself, Cox spilled the fact that he had shown the fugitives a place to hide.
In Zekiah Swamp.
Cox swore the conspirators had moved on by April 24, crossing the Potomac River into Virginia with aid from a new guide, one Thomas Jones, but Ryder had his orders: leave no stoneâor mossy, rotten logâunturned. Some thought that Cox was brave enough to lie for Booth and Herold even now, diverting searchers while they fled deeper into the South by some alternate route. Ryder disagreed, but he was under orders. More important, he thought there was a possibilityâhowever slightâthat one or both conspirators might still be hiding somewhere in the swamp, and he was not about to be the man who let them slip away through negligence.
Even without assassins in the underbrush, the hunt was perilous. Aside from copperheadsâthe reptile kindâand timber rattlesnakes, black bears and rabid skunks, the manhunt had already cost multiple lives. A barge loaded with Union soldiers tracking Booth, the
Black Diamond,
had collided with the steamer
Massachusetts
on the Potomac, both sinking near Blackstone Island. Among the fifty dead were Union prisoners of war lately paroled in exchange for Confederate captives.
All that, without a shot fired, yet.
Ryder had given up on bagging Booth himself, a fantasy heâd briefly nurtured in the early hours of the manhunt. Now, it seemed that someone else would have the honor, if the actor didnât slip away entirely. Thinking of him safe and sound in Dixie Land infuriated Ryder, much less the idea of him sailing off to foreign shores. No other country had officially allied itself with the