Broken Fibula - Again!

[jonathan]

Yep, I had completely forgotten that he told Cobb he was going to Beantown. Deep down, I do believe he broke his leg jumping. I was somewhere not long ago, and there was one of those "Clearance such and such feet" signs. It was 12 or 13 feet, and for whatever reason I immediately thought of Booth jumping to the stage and how easy it would be to snap that bone if you landed awkwardly, which he apparently did.

Also, like Laurie said, there was so much confusion that I'm not sure how fair it is to expect people to remember whether or not Booth was limping. I remember reading We Saw Lincoln Shot, and one of the things that seemed to turn up a lot in people's stories was how quickly everything happened. The consensus seemed to be that I believe no more than about 30 seconds elapsed from the shot being fired to Booth escaping out of the back door. In that amount of time, with the complete confusion, It's just not realistic to expect people to notice a limp unless it was very obvious.

I've also wondered about Booth's claim of being thrown from the horse, and whether or not he said that because it maybe reflected a little better on him. Almost like he felt he had rid the world of this tyrant, he didn't want to ruin the story by letting people know he broke his leg jumping to the stage. So he told the story of being thrown from the horse, so that puts the blame on the horse. Kind of like, "oh no, I didn't do anything wrong, it was the horse". Probably not, just a thought lol

As far as his pants being muddy though, is there any description of how muddy? I know that sounds odd, but I would kind of expect that Herold was leading the way, so wouldn't his horse have kicked mud up onto Booth over the course of some miles? I don't know what kind of condition the roads were in or how much, if any, rain had fallen in the previous few days. And maybe they rode side by side. Just some thoughts.