and Broadway where the cartman indicated he had made his pickup. Hays walked the length of sidewalk, and by the public pump discovered a discoloration of the cobbles that may have been bloodstains.
He sent McArdel into a number of nearby buildings until he returned with a professional bookkeeper by the name of Wheeler. Mr. Wheeler told the high constable a week before he had been sitting in his office with a young lad who was a pupil of his. It was between three and four o’clock, he said, when a very agitated gentleman rushed in from the street and up the stairs. Soon, the bookkeeper said, he heard the sounds of an argument, the cry “You lie!” followed by the sounds of a struggle, what might have been swordplay.
“Swordplay?”
“That is what it sounded like, sir. I remember looking up from my work and saying to my pupil, ‘Did you hear that? What was it?’”
The bookkeeper continued, “My room is next to another engaged in a similar field. He keeps accounts, although he instructs in the art of ornamental penmanship as well.”
“What might this gentleman’s name be?” asked Hays.
“John Colt. After hearing such noise and such fright, everything suddenly had gone silent. Stealthily I crept to Mr. Colt’s door, from where I was sure the commotion emanated, and peered through the keyhole, displacing the cover, which was down, with the handle of my pen.”
“What did you see?”
“A man I assumed to be Mr. Colt with his back to the door, stooping over something and quietly raising it. There was no noise. All was still and quiet as the charnel house.”
Old Hays had heard enough.
“Do you know if Mr. Colt is in his office at this moment?”
“I cannot say. I think he is.”
The man who answered Hays’ knock was tall and lean, handsome of his style, well haberdashed, not a mollycoddle exactly, but a fussbudget, what surely might have been taken by a cartman, or anyone of a certain predisposition, as a high bloke.
“Mr. Colt?” Hays inquired.
“Mr. High Constable,” the man answered.
It would not be quite accurate to say John Colt looked cool to Hays, but he did not appear exactly flummoxed either.
“You recognize me, sir?”
“I imagine there are few in this city, High Constable, who would not.”
“Just so,” Hays said. “Sir, I am here under the most regrettable of circumstances. Are you of the acquaintance of a printer by the name of Samuel Adams?”
Colt’s expression barely changed, but, as perceived by Hays, change it did. “I am not,” the suspect said.
“You are certain? A gentleman by the name of Samuel Adams?”
“I am certain, sir. I do not know this individual.”
“I see. And you are not the one to have sent a crate packed with the body of a man, this man, this gentleman whom you do not know, Mr. Samuel Adams, to New Orleans?”
Colt stepped back, smiling in what Hays saw as a disturbing, most unsettling manner.
Still, he denied all.
Hays tipped his bowler to him, bid him good afternoon, and returned to the street. He ordered McArdel to post a man outside the building with instructions to follow Colt wherever he might go.
McArdel himself was to proceed immediately to Adams’ home and place of business to see if there might be any record, or anyone with knowledge, perhaps his wife, of a previous connection between these two gentlemen, Mr. Adams and Mr. Colt.
HIGH CONSTABLE HAYS was a well-known figure. Many criminals were stopped in their tracks when they heard uttered the warning, “Beware, Old Hays is after you.” Before dawn the following morning, the high constable, with Sergeant McArdel accompanying him in accustomed role of strong arm, came for Mr. John C. Colt at his home on Washington Square. After awakening the suspect, Hays requested that he accompany him to the Dead House, where, unbeknownst to him, the body of Samuel Adams was lying under a sheet.
The atmosphere in the Dead House justifiably brought a chill to Colt. In the cold and cavernous room, Hays reposed questions to him, and again the suspect assiduously denied the murder of the printer Adams, denied even knowing him.
Bearing him no heed, Old Hays persisted with his questioning. He was accustomed to initiating his interrogation with a warning: “Good citizens will tell the truth.”
He would intone this statement just so, cracking his staff in accompaniment on the hard floor for additional effect.
Adams’ body remained covered, and the room in the Dead House was dark and sinister.
Hays suddenly swept the sheet off the corpse. “Look upon this body!” he ordered Colt. At the same time, he carefully shone the beam of his lantern on the remains. “Behold the cold and clammy body of your victim, Mr. Colt! Have you ever seen this man before?”
Colt jerked back, terrified, and cried out in horror, but Hays, unrelenting, shoved him forward and pressed his head down until the suspect was forced to stare into the clouded eyes of the dead man.
“Murderer!” cried Hays. “Confess! Now, have you ever seen this man before?”
Colt broke into sobs. “Yes, Mr. Hays, as God is my witness, he is Samuel Adams and I have murdered him.”
A WARRANT was subsequently sworn and acted upon in the name of John C. Colt, and a confession to the following effect written by the alleged perpetrator.
“On the morning of Friday, September 17, 1841,” Colt began, “my publisher, Mr. Samuel Adams, called at my home on the north side of Washington Square, telling my manservant, Dillback, he had something most urgent to discuss with me. At the time, according to Dillback, he was told most politely I was still asleep.
“Mr. Adams asked if I could not be awakened,” Colt continued. “Dillback, who is an Englishman and beyond scrutiny, replied that I could not.
“Mr. Adams then requested paper and pen, sat down at the hall writing desk, and wrote a short note to me. He requested if I might not be given it as soon as I awakened. Then he bid good day and left.”
AGED TWENTY-SIX, John Colt was scion to the Colt armament business, the youngest of three brothers; his eldest brother being Samuel, the patriarch of the family and inventor of the Colt Paterson repeating revolver.
Young John, however, was not part of his brother’s firearm business. He aspired instead to the literary life and to literary fame.
His course?
Whatever means necessary, according to some detractors, including Olga Hays, who knew him vaguely as a hanger-on at Harper Brothers, and so informed her father.
Artistic
