Death in a hansom

EDMUND PEARSON

A return to the past via a gay-nineties vehicle in which liquor and lust led to a sudden and mysterious death

THEY MET AT . . .—It was too bad that hansom-cabs should fall under a blight. A curse descended upon them thirty years ago, come the fourth of next June. Although they were jolly, teetery-looking carriages, and more innocent than your limousines, righteous folk thought of them, for many years, as chariots of sin.

The notorious hansom which disgraced all its tribe in New York was driven by Frederick Michaels, and the black hour came upon him on a fair June morning in 1904. The time was as early as half-past seven—when sinners have usually gone to bed, and the virtuous are abroad. Michaels and his horse trained with the good and the pure, and so they were looking for business in Columbus Circle, while the dew was still on the grass in Central Park.

A man and a girl hailed the cab. They got in; the hansom turned, I suppose, through 59th Street, and started down Fifth Avenue.

The only noise it made was the familiar cloppety-elop of the horse's hooves on the asphalt. But if Michaels had been endowed with second-sight—no, with second-hearing—he would have detected the Fates, or other sinister creatures, muttering the soon-to-be notorious names of: "Miss-Nan-Patterson-and-Caesar-Young . . . Miss-NanPat terson-and-Caesar-Young."

And, as an accompanying chorus of doom, like the unpleasant old busybodies in a Greek tragedy, the grumbling voices of half a dozen New York clergymen, who were very shortly to be repeating the names of the man and the girl, and adding: "The-wages-of-sin-is-certainly-death . . . the-wages-of-sin-is-certainly-death."

Ann Elizabeth Patterson, a fatally beautiful lady of twenty-two, was a native of Washington, 1). C. Newspapers said that three men had already died—absolutely perished and crossed the dark river—for love of her. From her sixteenth to her twentieth year she had been the wife of a railroad official named Martin, but she secured a divorce in 1903.

Her real celebrity, up to the moment she entered this hansom, lay in the fact that she was a "Floradora girl". As it is said to be a scientific fact that when "the original Floradora double sextette"—i.e., twelve persons—held a reunion in Pittsburgh, it took five hotels to accommodate them, we must inquire into Nan Patterson's exact status in that vast chorus. Good authorities say that she belonged to the second sextette, organized by Edna Wallace Hopper in 1901.

On a westbound train, before her divorce. Nan Patterson met Frank T. Young, called "Caesar." Mr. Young, an Englishman, had come to America, years earlier, to compete in track and field athletics for the Manhattan Athletic Club. He married; fell upon hard times; took up book-making at Morris Park track, where he prospered greatly— sometimes as a result of the excellent advice of his wife, who was a good judge of horses. He was said to possess §750,000. In his pocket, as he sat in the cab, were §1,820 and two tickets on the S. S. Germanic, sailing for Europe that morning at 10 o'clock.

The second ticket was not for Miss Patterson, but for Mrs. Young, then waiting on, or near, the ship. She was patiently and tolerantly hoping that her husband's promise to sail with her indicated the end of his affair with "that Patterson woman."

HE SAID AND SHE SAID.— Early in the morning, Miss Patterson had been called by telephone at the St. Paul Hotel in 60th Street, where she lived with her sister and brother-in-law, the J. Morgan Smiths. Caesar Young bade her meet him at the 59th Street station of the 6th Avenue "El. This she did, and she is the only witness to most of the events which followed, for the cabman remained more aloof than the gods upon Olympus.

It was, by her account, a bibulous ride. Caesar bad already been drinking when she met him. They had a drink together before taking the cab. On the way down the Avenue, Caesar discussed his old hat, and the universal opinion that he needed a new one. At Knox's, in Madison Square, he alighted and bought a new hat. In Bleecker Street —they were on their way toward the pier— he demanded another drink. They had this, and when they were once more in the cab. Caesar was melancholy, affectionate, and despairing, by turns.

"Are you going to leave me? Or are you going to follow me to Europe?"

The girl replied:

"I am not going to Europe."

She went on: "When he grabbed hold of me, and kissed me roughly, I pulled away from him . . . there was a flash, and he was dead," she added: "I never saw the pistol."

This happened in West Broadway, near Franklin Street. Michaels was at last made aware that something was going on. He drew up to the curb; a policeman came, and found Miss Patterson kissing her companion's face, as his head lay in her lap. Caesar never spoke, but died five minutes after reaching the hospital.

THE CONSEQUENCES WERE . . .—Whose was the pistol? Where did it come from? Which hand pulled the trigger? No jury which tried Miss Patterson for murder ever found an answer to these questions.

The defence steadily maintained that "Caesar" Young, in profound melancholia at this separation from his sweetheart, or from a recent loss of §30,000 on the track, or from drink, or from all three causes, held the pistol under his coat and shot himself. The prosecution's theory was that Nan Patterson had been urged to the slaughter by J. Morgan Smith, who feared that she was losing a wealthy friend. The evidence, by which they sought to bolster up this doubtful idea, failed them altogether. The ownership of the pistol was not satisfactorily traced to anybody. But for eleven months, the sob-sisters and the Sunday newspapers continued to discuss the Floradora girl, her affairs, and her venerable father, while the country at large had a good time deploring the wickedness of New York.

The first trial was stopped by the illness of a juror. At the second trial the jury disagreed—6 to 6. At the third trial there was another disagreement: 7 to 5 for acquittal, and the prisoner was discharged.

Miss Patterson's subsequent career upon the stage, in Pennsylvania, was brief and unsuccessful. Her later life, on the Pacific coast, has, it is said, brought her happiness and the esteem of her neighbors. It is a pleasure to record this, since, if I may venture an opinion, she deserved an acquittal. The government's theory that she plotted to commit the crime, seems practically destroyed by the fact that the meeting, that morning, was not the result of her arrangement.

We know the fate of some of the participants in that early morning drive down the Avenue. The horse, in the natural course of things, would be dead. But where are the cabman and the hansom itself? Properly stuffed and mounted they could well form an important exhibit in the Museum of the City of New York. As one of the most famous vehicles in our history, the cab deserves a place beside Boss Tweed's fire-engine, with the Tammany Tiger on it.