A dark stain spread around the President’s head and the Surgeon General announced that Lincoln had sustained a fresh hemorrhage. The doctors lifted his head and a new pillow and case were placed on the bed. The hair around the wound was cleaned and cotton batting was pressed against it. After that, the President’s breathing appeared to be more regular.
Gray light began to swell against the bedroom windows. In the room, the gaslight seemed to pale. Dr. Barnes sat at the head of the bed, trying to take a pulse from the carotid artery. Halfway to the feet of the patient, Dr. Leale sat, still holding Lincoln’s hand, now and then checking the pulse in the flaccid wrist, sometimes getting a count, sometimes getting nothing. On the wall side of the bed, Dr. Stone sat, as helpless as the others.
The faces in the room had changed during the long night. Two, besides the doctors, remained constant. One was Robert Lincoln, still standing behind the head of the bed, looking down. The other was Secretary of the Navy Welles, fat and solemn, sitting with a hand on one knee, staring at this man who was, in effect, almost the last soldier to die in the war.
Death was roosting in the room now. Everyone present knew it. In the early hours, the President looked relaxed and, in spite of the medical prognosis, one would expect him to awaken any moment. Now, with the bullet lodged directly behind it, the right eye was swollen and purpled. The lips were cyanotic. The heart throbbed, skittered, and seemed to stop. The legs were as cold as the marble tabletops. Breathing stopped for long periods, and after a few seconds one or two of the doctors would pull out watches to note the exact time of death. Suddenly, the lungs would burst with air, the heart would dance with life, and the President would groan through half-opened lips, as though, in a dream, he was walking down the White House stairs asking: “Who is dead?”
Mrs. Lincoln sat quietly. Laura Keene and Clara Harris were too spent for conversation. In the silence, they sat looking at the wall, or watching the inexorable growth of light in the room. As in a distance, they could hear the deep voices of the doctors in the bedroom and, now and then, the thin pitch of Mr. Stanton asking for something. In sound, the thud of boots and the clank of spurs never seemed to stop. For days, it seemed, soldiers had been walking through the hall outside this room. For the rest of her life, Mrs. Lincoln would dread the sight and sound of them.
An officer of General Augur’s staff awakened the general agent of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad at his hotel. This was Mr. George S. Koontz, and he did not know the news. When he heard it, he dressed quickly, asking again and again to make sure that this was not a mistake or, worse, a joke.
The captain accompanied Mr. Koontz to the terminal and said that the government wanted the B & O to stop all trains leaving Washington. All road exits from the city had been sealed, and Stanton wanted to prevent the assassins from leaving town by train.
At the depot, they found the waiting room and the train platforms swarming with soldiers and detectives. The first northbound train scheduled was the 6:15. Koontz issued orders that no train was to leave the station. When the cars had been made up, and backed into the siding, passengers climbed aboard and then detectives went aboard and studied every person in every car. The soldiers examined all luggage and all mail bags. They questioned the engineer, the fireman, the conductor and the brakemen. It was then decided, although the scheduled time had not arrived, that this train could depart at once.
The bewildered passengers stared out of the windows as the train eased out of the depot, picked up speed, and got as far as Relay House, a short distance on the road to Baltimore, where it was stopped by General Tyler. He explained to the train crew that Relay House was in his domain, and that if the army in Washington permitted trains to leave the city, that was their business. His business was to stop them at Relay House, and there the trains would remain.
The general, who got his star by obeying orders implicitly, also stopped all southbound trains out of Baltimore so that, in a short while, he had several trains standing on the tracks. Some passengers begged him to permit two sick children to continue their journey home, but the general said no.
Thus, if any of the conspirators had elected to take the morning train out of Washington, he would have been stopped at Relay House—provided, of course, that he could get through the tight military net at Washington depot—and later, when traffic was cleared through to Baltimore, such a conspirator would not have been able to make any train connections to New York or to Canada, as some were to charge that John Surratt did.
It was another gray and misty day and Robert Nelson, Negro, was walking across Lafayette Square on his way to work. He was crossing the street in front of Mr. Seward’s home when he saw a knife. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand. A soldier, now patrolling in front of The Old Clubhouse, watched him and came out in the street and asked what he had picked up. Nelson showed him the knife. The soldier took it.
Lewis Paine had dropped it.
Twenty minutes later, a half mile to the east, William Clendin was walking down F Street toward Eighth when he saw a Negro woman run out of a doorway, step into the gutter, and pick something up. As he approached, he asked her what it was. In silence, she handed him a knife and a sheath.
A woman leaned out of an upstairs window and told Clendin that she had raised the shade and had noticed something in the road and had sent her maid down for it. Clendin held it aloft and told her that it was a knife and sheath. The lady said she would not permit it in the house and slammed the window.
Clendin turned it over to the police. Atzerodt had thrown it away.