Duel with the Devil Read Online Free

Duel with the Devil
Book: Duel with the Devil Read Online Free
Author: Paul Collins
Pages:
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the thieves were pursued back to a hideout, confederates were found melting silver into crude ingots that still had bits of stolen spoons sticking out.
    As each night fell and the city burned with fever outside, residents barred their doors to thieves and waited. The wakeful boarders of208 Greenwich could hear … 
something
. Unable to sleep in the humid evening air, Levi’s apprentice might have been the first to notice the hushed movements across the creaking wooden floors, the bedroom doors locked in the night, the stirrings in the very frame of the building.
Something
could be discerned through thewalls. Not the rifling of any thief. It was the sound of two people—and not the sound of Quaker chastity.
    But who?
    C OME BACK SOON
,Elias Ring wrote to his wife in the first days of October.
I miss you
.
    It was a hopeless request: The city was still far too dangerous. Yellow fever deaths were marching up even the formerly safe environs of Greenwich Street; William Laight had interrupted his weather log’s tally of deaths to ominously note by one entry: “Cassie, our neighbor.” Alaborer a few houses farther up came next, and then a cart driver. By October 7, 1799, when atenant died at a boardinghouse on 189 Greenwich, the inhabitants of 208 could feel death closing in. Hiding inside and peering out the window hardly brought any comfort: Pigeons with strange gangrenous sores had started appearing on the city streets.
    “In this pestilential period,” one local paper mused grimly, “scarcely a species of animal escapes a portion of evil.”
    Doctors scrambled to find a treatment. The eminent DavidHosack confidently presented a sweating cure; and then, as his patients died writhing in perspiration, he quietly withdrew it. Then again, he could hardly compete with the cure promoted by the most popular physician in the country, Elisha Perkins. The inventor of “metallic tractors”—three-inch alloy rods that could “draw off the noxious electrical fluid that lay at the root of suffering”—Dr. Perkins had moved into the city and promptly set up shop over on John Street. Perkins had sold thousand of metal tractors, and his customers for the magic rods included George Washington; now Manhattanites would be blessed by this same doctor’s genius.
    “Having obtained from various experiments satisfactory evidence that the Yellow Fever is within control,” Dr. Perkins advertised, “it is his intention, if he finds suitable encouragement, to continue his residence in this city.” Alas, he found neither. Within weeks, hewas bundled into a winding sheet and sent back to Connecticut, as lifeless as his wonder-working chunks of metal.
    Nothing seemed to work.
    “To pour buckets of cold water on the head of a man … Three years ago this experiment was the vogue!!!” complained Noah Webster. “Copious bleeding has had its day. But [now] mercury seems to be the favorite.… Where one patient survives its effect, ten proved fatal.”
    The only real relief, in this as in every other outbreak for the past century, would come from the heavens. “First frost,” noted William Laight in his logbook on October 18, 1799. Those two simple words held a vast sense of relief; for now, as the fall leaves turned bright, the fever surely would end. Word spread out into the countryside, and within a week the city’s residents had begun to reappear, hale and rested from their months away. “General movement back,” Laight dutifully wrote down in his logbook.
    The summer’s refugees discovered a city that was now rather the worse for wear. Merchants found their cellars smashed into, and trunks of merchandise opened and stolen.An abandoned flock of sheep, their owner likely dead, milled around by New Street. In front of the Tontine Coffee House,two cannons were simply dropped on the ground, perhaps by a fleeing homeowner unable to blast the miasma out of his backyard.
    But there were hopeful signs, too. Full columns of notices in
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