He began to draw glances from the onlookers, and then from the guardsmen. Three of the policemen sidled along up the row of people, apparently straightening the line and narrowing it strictly to single file as it got close to the president. When they reached the Italian, one of them spoke to him in a low voice and took his arm like an usher to move him a pace to the left. He reacted like a madman. He punched the policeman, and turned to charge the other two. They were taken by surprise, so he bowled them over into a pair of ladies, who were thrown roughly backward onto the carpet.
That part of the line became a battle royal, with eight or nine soldiers and all the policemen diving onto the pile and delivering blows with less judiciousness than fervor. When the sudden motion froze into a contest of tugging and resisting, I recognized that the swarthy Italian had a profile very familiar to me. I also noticed that he had one of the women in an apparently unbreakable embrace. After a second I realized the offended woman was the disguised man Holmes had recognized on the train.
Just then, as the crowd ahead of the Italian swept forward, partly to meet the president and partly to get out of the way of the fighting, one of their number, a man who looked Central European—perhaps a Serb or a Croatian, with dark skin, hair, and mustache—stepped into the vanguard. He had a white handkerchief in his hand, as several others did, to wipe away the perspiration before shaking the president’s hand. I saw that nearly all of the policemen and soldiers were occupied with the disorderly Italian and the ones still near the president were watching the fray, mesmerized. So when the man aimed a revolver he’d hidden under the handkerchief at the president, there was no one there in time to prevent it.
He fired once, and a brass button on the president’s coat threw sparks. His second shot was not deflected. The president gripped his belly and fell. As the president fell, the soldiers and policemen let go of the unruly Italian. Some went to the president’s side, and the others surrounded the assassin. Fortunately, a tall man of African descent had been behind the shooter in the line. He batted the gun from the man’s hand and kept him from escaping. If he had not done that, the soldiers almost certainly would have shot the culprit. Instead, they dragged him to the floor and delivered a series of kicks and punches.
The president, lying on the carpet in the arms of his secretary and Mr. Milburn, called out, “Don’t hurt him, boys!” The calm, wise words seemed to bring the men to their senses. They subdued the culprit and took him out to a police van that was parked near the building.
Meanwhile, I pushed my way to the president’s side. “I’m a doctor,” I called out, and the guards made room. I opened his coat as I leaned close to listen to his breathing. As I did, I surreptitiously produced a small vial of fresh chicken blood from my waistcoat and spilled it on the white shirt just above the belt. “He’s wounded, but alive,” I said. “Lift the president to his carriage,” I ordered. “We’ll take him to the field hospital on the Exposition grounds.”
The strong young soldiers nearby lifted the president and placed him in the carriage. I joined him and Captain Allen jumped into the driver’s seat and whipped the horses to such a gallop that I feared the president would die in a carriage accident and take me with him. I managed to speak with him a bit in a low voice. “How are you, sir?” I asked.
“Excellent, Dr. Watson,” he said. “Seldom better.”
“Good. We’ll try to keep you that way. Now put on this coat and hat.” It was a rather dull brown coat that looked very different from his tailored black one, and a bowler hat like the ones many men wore that day. When we were near the Indian Congress, Captain Allen drove the coach into a horse barn. Allen and I got into a second coach that was waiting there. Our horses had easily outrun word of the attack on the president, and as we pulled away, I could see that none of the visitors touring the Exposition noticed Mr. McKinley in his new garb entering the Indian Congress.
Captain Allen whipped the new set of horses, and I went to work on the substitute patient already waiting on the seat, a cadaver that Dr. Park and I had selected at the medical school the previous day. I covered his torso with Mr. McKinley’s black coat, and his face with my handkerchief, as though keeping the sun out of his eyes. When we reached the field hospital, I jumped out, and Captain Allen and I put the corpse on a stretcher. Two orderlies loitering outside rushed to carry it in. “To the operating room immediately,” I shouted. We took the stretcher inside and locked the door.
After a few minutes, Dr. Roswell Park arrived at the door with several of his assistants and nurses, and made the little hospital look as though it were being run with great professional skill. With him to assist, I began the operation. I had removed bullets from a number of soldiers while on duty in India, so I was extremely familiar with the procedure and the many ways in which it can succeed or fail. As I worked on the cadaver to make it look as though it had been opened to search for the bullet, he complimented my technique several times.
We had only the open part of the abdomen uncovered by sheets, and the deceased man who was supposed to be the president lay on his back with a face mask over his mouth and nose and a surgical cap on his head. Nonetheless, it occurred to me that we were fortunate that while millions of lightbulbs were displayed everywhere throughout the Exposition, nobody had thought to install a single bulb in the hospital.
Through Dr. Park’s nurses and assistants, we slowly fed our fiction to the outside world. We said the president was a healthy specimen, and he had been lucky. The first bullet had hit a brass button and ricocheted, leaving a shallow gash along his side. The second shot entered the abdomen at close range, but the pistol had been a small caliber, and most likely Dr. Mann would find and remove the bullet in the present surgery. Once that happened, McKinley could be expected to recover fully. But after more than four hours of surgery, we changed the news slightly. Dr. Mann had not found the bullet, which must have fragmented in the body.
This was the story all that evening. It was still the story when we moved the cadaver to Mr. Milburn’s house to recover.
At various times during the next few days we issued reports that the president was recovering nicely, that his spirits were high, and that we expected an early return to health.
Meanwhile, as Holmes told me later, the rest of the deception went tolerably well. The assassin captured at the Temple of Music was taken to the police station. He, of course, was Mr. Booth. He identified himself as Leon Czolgosz, the son of Polish immigrants, who had been struck by the inequality in the way the president was treated compared with an ordinary man. Because of Chief Bull’s fears of public emotion aroused by his crime, Czolgosz was kept apart from other prisoners.
The president had made his way into the Indian village, where he met Holmes, no longer an Italian madman. Holmes was waiting for the president with three Iroquois Indians he had met while they were studying at the University of London years before—two Senecas and a Mohawk. Holmes applied some of the makeup he had brought, and within a few minutes he and the president were the fourth and fifth Iroquois Indians. After nightfall, the five men left the Exposition in the midst of a growing crowd, and rowed across the Niagara River into Canada.
With the help of his Iroquois friends, Holmes conveyed Mr. McKinley to Montreal, where he put him on the steamship
Five days after the
Nine days later, on the testimony of eyewitnesses, Leon Czolgosz, the young man who had shot the president, was convicted of murder. He was taken from the court to Auburn Penitentiary, where he was executed in an electric chair, another application of the marvels of electricity celebrated by the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. The one flaw of the modern method in comparison to hanging was that when a single wire was loosened, an electric chair became simply a chair. A fine actor can perform a set of death throes that would make a gravedigger faint.
Holmes and Dr. Mann were among the dignitaries who attended the very small funeral held at the penitentiary for the murderer. The casket had been nailed shut because the face of the killer Czolgosz had been disfigured by sulfuric acid poured on the corpse by persons unknown. Presiding over the funeral was a young
