Duel with the Devil Read Online Free Page A

the newspaper ran under the heading RETURNS . Mr. Fontbonne posted his yearly announcement of trees for sale for fall planting— PEACHES, PLUMBS, GREEN GAGES & C .—and John Street burbled with the sound of girls being sent back to Mr. Reed’s tutorials inEnglish and geography. The city swelled back to life; soon the autumn harvest poured into the market squares, and Long Island cod landed heavily on the docks.
    The frosty morning air also hinted at the coming winter. After a summer ofgouging dying families on the price of coffins and nails,speculators were now buying up local supplies of wood and stickingresidents for an extortionate six dollars a cord. Back at the boardinghouse, Richard Croucher prepared for the winter fabric buying season, while Elma, ailing some days but not others, often remained curled up in her bed on the second floor. Drops of laudanum helped with her pain, though not enough—“I should not be afraid to drink it full,” she’d tease after taking a few ineffectual drops from the medicine vial. Levi looked in on Elma when he could, but he was putting in long hours at his brother’s work sites, knowing the building season would soon slow.
    The humbler folk of the city were already stopping work to celebrate the season. The end of the pestilence had come just in time for the city’s Irish immigrants to indulge intheir peculiar love of Halloween. Living down by the muddy docks, they’d been hit worst of all by the fever. Toasting loudly and singing lilting airs, they gathered that evening to roast nuts and apples over open fires, and drank whiskey in the graveyard as the autumn night of All Hallow’s Eve closed over them and their fellow Manhattanites.
    They had survived.

T HE CITY ’ S RECOVERY WAS FAST — A LITTLE TOO FAST, SOME worried.
    “But a few days ago our city was covered with sack-cloth and ashes,” wrote one
New-York Mercantile Advertiser
correspondent. “Scarcely a carriage was to be seen but the black and dismal hearse; nothing was to be heard in habitations but the expiring groans of victims, and the lamentations of surviving friends. Thank God the scene has changed; business and bustle, joy and gladness have taken place of Death and his sickly band of diseases.” But now, he fretted, youth with “their bottles, their billiards, and their brothels” were roaming the streets. Where, he demanded, was “he who convinces giddy youth that wisdom does not consist in the thickness of his pudding neck-cloth, the breadth of his whiskers, or the spindle straw size of his rat tail queue?” And what better way to save the young men of the city from such foolishness, the correspondent wondered, than by occupying them with an intellectual puzzle?
    “I therefore humbly hint,” he proposed, “that a certain premium be offered, say a hundred guineas, to any one who shall produce the best solution to any philosophical or mathematical problem.”
    In fact, some of Manhattan’s greatest minds had already spent the previous year grappling with a deadly serious puzzle: what to do about the city’s foul and brackish water. Potable water was supplied by just one well, the Tea-Water Pump, a couple of blocks north of the site being considered for a new city hall. Some residents madepilgrimages there, like a thirsty urban herd to an oasis: The proprietors would let you fill up a large barrel for threepence. Everyone else waited for theTea-Water Men, a small army of deliverymen who carted massive wooden 140-gallon hogshead casks around the city, selling water by the bucket to subscribing households.
    But everyone knew the stuff was terrible.
    “They pretend their water is pure and nice; it is no such thing,” one of Noah Webster’s correspondents charged. The local pond not far from the well, known as the Collect, had become “a very sink and common sewer”—a frothing brew of effluence from tanneries and furnaces. “Dead dogs, cats, etc, [are] thrown in daily,” one resident grumbled,