and as the officers had been in the habit of
amusing themselves during the winter by fox-hunting, I decided to use
the hunt as an expedient for stealing a march on the enemy and had it
given out that a grand fox-chase would take place on the 29th of
February. Knowing that Lomas and Renfrew would spread the
announcement south they were permitted to see several red foxes as
well as a pack of hounds which had been secured for the spurt and
were then started on a second expedition to burn the bridges. Of
course, they were shadowed, and two days later were arrested in
Newtown. On the way north, they escaped from their guards when
passing through Baltimore, and I never heard of them again, though I
learned that, after the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, Secretary
Stanton strongly suspected his friend Lomas of being associated with
the conspirators and it then occurred to me that the good-looking
Renfrew may have been Wilkes Booth, for he certainly bore a strong
resemblance to Booth's pictures."

There is no doubt that "Lemoss," the witness, and the "Lomas" of General
Sheridan's narrative, were one and the same person. When he wrote the
account from which the foregoing is an extract, General Sheridan had,
probably, forgotten about leaving the spies in Winchester under guard
where they remained until he was well on his way towards Appomattox.
After giving his testimony, Lomas and Renfrew were sent north under
guard by General Hancock, Sheridan's successor as commander of the
Middle Military Division, and making their escape as explained in
Sheridan's narrative, Wilkes Booth, alias Renfrew, was able to carry out
his part of the plot. It is, also, quite probable that Lomas's part in
the conspiracy was to assassinate either General Sheridan or Secretary
Stanton, but, that the scheme was interrupted by the detention of the
two spies in Winchester coupled with the unexpected opening of the
spring campaign. It is likely that the arrest of the two conspirators
led to a postponement of the date of the assassination and that the
scope of the plot as originally conceived in the fertile brain of Booth,
was very much abridged. There was never in my own mind a particle of
doubt, from the moment we heard the news of the president's death, that
the man Lomas or Lemoss had something to do with it. The fact that he
was on terms of intimacy with Secretary Stanton and contrived to be
stationed at Sherida