The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes BoothTownsend, George Alfred
History
The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth
Townsend, George Alfred
Assassins -- United States -- Biography; Booth, John Wilkes, 1838-1865; Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Assassination
With this man's face before me as I write, I am reminded of some Maori
chief waging war from the lust of blood or the pride of local dominion.
His complexion is bloodless, yet so healthy that a passing observer
would afterward speak of it as ruddy. His face is broad, with a
character nose, sensual lips, and very high cheek bones; the cranium is
full and the brow speaking, while the head runs back to an abnormal apex
at the tip of the cerebellum. His straight, lusterless black hair, duly
parted, is at the summit so disturbed that tufts of it rise up like Red
Jacket's or Tecumseh's; but the head is kept well up, and rests upon a
wonderfully broad throat, muscular as one's thigh, and without any
trace, as he sits, of the protuberance called Adam's apple. Withal, the
eye is the man Payne's power. It is dark and speechless, and rolls here
and there like that of a beast in a cage which strives in vain to
understand the language of its captors. It seems to say, if anything,
that, it has no sympathy with anybody approximate, and has submitted,
like a lion bound, to the logic of conviction and of chains.
Payne looks at none of his fellow-prisoners: assassins caught seldom
cares to recognise each other; for while there is faithfulness among
thieves, there is none among murderers. His great white eyeball never
roves to anybody's in the dock, nor theirs to his. He has confessed his
crime and they know it; so they have no mutual hope; they listen to the
evidence because it concerns them; ho looks at it only, because it
cannot save him. He is entirely beardless, yet in his boyish chin more
of a man physically than the rest, combined.
While I watch this man I am constantly repeating to myself that stanza
of Bryant's:
"Upon the market place he stood,--
A man of giant frame,
Amid the gathering multitude
That shrank to hear his name;
All proud of step and firm of limb,
His dark eye on the ground--
And silently they gazed on him,
As on a lion bound."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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