Free Fiend by Harold Schechter Page A

Horace Millen story broke—that Mary Field realized just how lucky her child had been.

14

The wicked flee when no man pursueth.
—Proverbs 28:1
    T he Panic of 1873 began on Thursday, September 18, with the failure of two of New York’s leading banking houses—those of Jay Cooke and George Opdyke. Stock prices fell so precipitously on the following day—“Black Friday,” September 19—that the Stock Exchange was closed for the rest of the month. The resulting depression was the worst since 1837 and did not abate for five years. Bankruptcies increased by the month, hitting their peak in 1878 when nearly 11,000 businesses failed.
    One melancholy sign of the depression was the sharp rise in the number of paupers. There were no homeless shelters per se in the 1870s. In New York and other big cities, people without a roof over their heads sought shelter in police stations. The accommodations were rudimentary: a rough wooden plank to sleep on (generally in an unventilated cellar) and, occasionally, a meager breakfast in the morning. But for many vagrants—particularly women—even this bare-bones hospitality was preferable to an unprotected night on the streets.
    According to statistics maintained by the New York City Police Department, there were just over 136,000 of these so-called “station-house lodgers” in 1871. By 1875, that number had risen to nearly a quarter-million.
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    Though the depression hadn’t reduced him to beggary, John Anderson Millen—a thirty-one-year-old cabinetmaker with a dusty little shop in Charlestown—had been hit hard by the crisis. His business had fallen off so drastically that he could no longer afford the rent on his house. And so, during the secondweek of April, 1874, he and his family—his wife, Leonora, and their two small boys, Sidney and Horace—packed their scant belongings and moved to cheaper lodgings, a rundown frame house on Dorchester Street in South Boston.
    As it happened, their new dwelling was located almost directly across the street from the home of John and Katherine Curran, whose ten-year-old girl, Katie, had vanished without a trace just a few weeks earlier. Every now and then, Mrs. Millen would glance out her kitchen window and see one or the other of the missing girl’s parents emerge from their front door, shoulders bowed, faces haggard with grief.
    The sight of her care-ravaged neighbors never failed to fill Mrs. Millen’s heart with pity and make her count her own blessings. Her own family may have fallen on hard times. But nothing could possibly be harder than the ordeal of the Currans, whose little child had left home on a simple errand one morning and was never seen again.
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    Mrs. Millen’s own younger child, four-year-old Horace, had features of such extreme delicacy—porcelain skin, large dark eyes, rosebud mouth, silky blond hair—that he was frequently mistaken for a girl. Mrs. Millen did her best to emphasize his beauty by dressing him in the prettiest clothes the family could afford. On the morning of April 22, 1874—a raw, overcast Wednesday, precisely five weeks after Katie Curran’s disappearance—his outfit consisted of knee breeches with a checkered waist; a red-and-white-checked shirt trimmed with black velvet; a white and black jacket; white woolen socks and high-laced boots; and a black velvet cap trimmed with gold braid and a tassel.
    Slender as Horace was, there was nothing especially dainty about his appetite, particularly his craving for sweets. Shortly before 10:00 A.M. —just a few hours after he had polished off a substantial breakfast—he began nagging his mother for money to visit the bakery. Though the family was hard-pressed for cash, Mrs. Millen—whose husband regularly accused her of spoiling their sons—could not resist Horace’s demands and finally handed him a few pennies.
    “Come back by lunchtime,” she called as he hurried out the front door.
    Though her children were newcomers to the