Free Killer Colt by Harold Schechter Page B

the street and supporting the boxas it came downstairs.” Hasty waited until “the man had got the box downstairs and placed it on the right side of the entryway,” near a door belonging to a corner drugstore called Slocum’s. Hasty then climbed to the fourth floor and knocked on Verbruyck’s door. When no one answered, he went back downstairs, passing Law Octon—“an elderly light colored man” in Hasty’s description—who was sweeping the hallway of the second floor.
    When he reached street level, Hasty saw the shirt-sleeved gentleman still standing in the entry beside the crate. Hasty “asked the man if he knew where Mr. Verbruyck was.” The man gave a brusque reply, saying “that he did not live in the building.” As Hasty made his exit, he glanced down at the box and “observed that it was marked on the outside with blue ink.” 2
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    A few minutes later, Law Octon came downstairs again and saw the box “in the entryway of the first floor, between the banister of the stairs and the apothecary’s store.” Colt, standing there with “no coat or vest,” was searching the street through the open doorway. He seemed, Octon said afterward, “to be looking out for a cartman.” 3
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    Long before the advent of truckers and moving vans, the job of hauling goods from one place to another in old New York was handled by professional cartmen. Members of this trade, numbering about three thousand in 1841, were licensed by the city council, which set the rates they were allowed to charge and fixed the size and shape of carts “in order to insure standard loads.”
    Cartmen who specialized in household moves required spring carts and other equipment “suitable for transporting furnishings, pictures, looking-glasses and other valuables.” The ordinary “catch cartman,” however—who waited at a curbside cart-stand or roamed the streets ready “to grab the first job that was offered”—drove a more rudimentary vehicle: little more than a seatless wooden sled mounted on a pair of wagon wheels and hitched to a dray horse. Standing atop their carts in their long white frock coats, heavy black boots, and broad-brimmed hats, these hardy workingmen—“a cross between the cab driver and teamster of today”—were a common sight in nineteenth-century New York. 4
    At approximately 8:45 a.m. on that raw, drizzly Saturday, Richard Barstow, a thirty-four-year-old licensed cartman, was driving east on Chambers Street when he spotted a man—hatless, in shirtsleeves—beckoning to him from the doorway of the Granite Building. As Barstow pulled his dray horse to a halt, the man hurried over.
    “Are you busy?” he asked. According to the cartman’s subsequent testimony, he was a slender gentleman of approximately Barstow’s age with thick curly hair and dark whiskers.
    “Not particularly,” said Barstow. “Why?”
    The man explained that he wanted to have a crate delivered to a ship docked at the foot of Maiden Lane. Since Barstow was headed in that direction anyway, he agreed to take it.
    Another cart was already parked lengthways at the curb in front of the building. It belonged to a fellow carter named Thomas Russell, who regularly hauled paintings to and from the Granite Building for the Apollo Association. Backing his own cart in front of Russell’s horse, Barstow dismounted and followed the shirtsleeved gentleman into the Chambers Street entrance of the building.
    There between the staircase and a door opening into Slocum’s pharmacy sat a big pine crate. Assisted by Russell, Barstow loaded the box—which weighed, according to his estimate, “from one hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds”—onto his cart. As he did, he noticed that the box “was directed to the care of some person at New Orleans.”
    Stepping back to the doorway where the coatless gentleman had watched the proceedings in silence, Barstow asked him “to what ship I was to carry the box.” The