Bohemian Days: Three American Tales

by George Alfred Townsend

THE MURDER.

Between the Delaware River and Girard Avenue, which is the market street of the future, and east of Frankfort Road, lies Kensington, a respectable old district of the Quaker City, and occupying the same relation to it that Kensington in England does to London. Beyond both Kensingtons is a Richmond, but the English Richmond is a beauteous hill, with poetical recollections of Pope and Thomson, while our Richmond is the coal district of Philadelphia, flat to the foot and dingy to the eye.

Kensington, however, was once no faint miniature of the staid British suburb. The river bending to the eastward there conducts certain of the streets crookedly away from the rectangular Quaker demon who is ever seeking to square them. Along the water side, or near it, passes a sort of Quay Street, between ship-yards and fish-houses on the one side, and shops or small tenements on the other, and this street scarcely discloses the small monument on the site of the Treaty Tree, where William Penn in person satisfied the momentary expectations of his Indian subjects.

Nearly parallel to the water side street is another, wider and more aristocratic, and lined with many handsome dwellings of brick, or even brown-stone, where the successful shipbuilders, fishtakers, coal men, and professional classes have established themselves or their posterity. This street was once called Queen, afterward Richmond Street, and it is crossed by others, as Hanover, Marlborough, and Shackamaxon, which attest in their names the duration of royal and Indian traditions hereabout. Pleasant maple, sometimes sycamore and willow trees shade these old streets, and they are kept as clean as any in this ever-mopped and rinsed metropolis, while the society, though disengaged from the great city, had its better and worser class, and was fastidious about morals and behavior, and not disinclined to express its opinion.

One winter day in a certain year Kensington had a real sensation. The Delaware was frozen from shore to shore, and one could walk on the ice from Smith's to Treaty Island, and from Cooper's Point to the mouth of the Cohocksink. On the second afternoon of the great freeze fires were built on the river, and crowds assembled at certain smooth places to see great skaters like Colonel Page cut flourishes and show sly gallantry to the buxom housewives and grass widows of Kensington and the Jerseys. A few horses were driven on the ice, and hundreds of boys ran merrily with real sleighs crowded down with their friends. A fight or two was improvised, and unlicensed vendors set forth the bottle that inebriates. In the midst of the afternoon gayety a small boy, kneeling down to buckle up to a farther hole the straps on his guttered skates, saw just at his toe something like human hair. The small boy rose to his feet and stamped with all his might around that object, not in any apprehension but because small boys like to know; and when the ice had been well broken, kneeling down and pulling it out in pieces with his mitten, the small boy felt something cold and smooth, and then he poked his finger into a human eye. It was a dead man. No sooner had the urchin found this out than he bellowed out at the top of his voice, running and falling as he yelled: "Murder! Murder! Murder!"

From all parts of the ice, like flies chasing over a silver salver toward some sweet point of corruption, the hundreds and thousands swarmed at the news that a dead body had been found. When they arrived on the spot, spades, picks, and ice-hooks had been procured by those nearest shore, and the whole mystery brought from the depths of the river to the surface.

There lay together on the ice two men, apparently several days in the water, and with the usual look of drowned people of good condition—glassy and of fixed expression, as if in the moment of death a consenting grimness had stolen into their countenances, neither composed nor terrified.

The bodies had been already recognized when the main part of the crowd arrived. Kensington people, generally, knew them both.

"It's William Zane and his business partner, Sayler Rainey! They own one of the marine railways at Kensington. Come to think of it, I haven't seen them around for nearly a week, neighbor!" exclaimed an old man.

"It's a case of drowning, no doubt," spoke up a little fellow who did a river business in old chains and junk. "You see they had another ship-mending place on the island opposite Kinsington, and rowin' theirselves over was upset and never missed!"