NO ONE EXPECTED BOOTH TO STOP RUNNING. SOON THE manhunters would track Booth to the Surrattsville tavern, and then to Doctor Mudd’s. But then the trail went cold. The assassin seemed to simply vanish. Back in Washington, the mood at the War Department turned foul. Had he done it? Had Lincoln’s murderer actually escaped? Booth was a man of impulse and action, not patience and inertia, and he knew the river was tantalizingly close. He was eager to cross it, so that he and Davey could be among friends on the Virginia side this very night. And he was convinced he could be, if only Jones agreed to act decisively. Hiding in a pine thicket for days seemed to increase the danger of capture, not reduce it. Still he deferred to the river ghost’s judgment. Booth knew that he still had no choice. Thomas Jones was Booth’s only hope. If he and Herold defied Jones, if they left the pines that night and made a desperate run for the river on their own, they would almost certainly be captured or killed.
