Harvey J. O'Higgins

“ Ben Murdock showed little emotion over the story of the murder. Once, when they were telling about the man who had been sent to jail for stealing the shot-gun, he took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead as if it were wet with perspiration. And a moment later, when they were telling how the other hired men had invariably turned out to be thieves, he suddenly raised to them a bewildered face of suffering. It moved Mrs. Heins to take him away from the visitors by offering to make up a bed for him on the parlor sofa. ”

“ It casts a doubt on the whole mechanistic theory of evolution. It brings back into the non-sentient world a long-banished creative intelligence. It permits a pan- psychic view of the universe that is mystical. Unless I am much mistaken, the name of Benjamin McNeil Murdock is likely to be one of the conspicuous names of the century, and his little farm in the Washington Valley may even become the storm-center of a controversy as world-shaking as the one that thundered over Darwin's pigeon-houses fifty years ago. ”

“ Young Ben Murdock had been sent to the village by his mother to get a stone vinegar-jug filled with kerosene for the household lamps. He found the yard in front of the school-house flaring with torchlights, and over the head of a silent audience he saw the long-haired Westerner, with a braided mustache, ballyhooing his medicine. The boy drew nearer. He ended by making his way into the front row, against the little platform on which Carmen was finishing a bored fandango to the castanets, while her husband praised his cure-all. ”

“ He had never been sent to school—and the authorities had not insisted that he should be sent—because it was understood that he was too "dumb" to learn. His father had given him that reputation; he wanted the boy at home to watch the cows; there were no secure fences on the Murdock farm, and Ben spent his days in the wood and pasture-lot as stupidly as a watch-dog. The father himself was "queer." He had not been quite right since he had fallen from a load of hay, struck his head, and been unconscious for three days "right smack in the middle o' the best hayin' weather." ”

“ He was up and out before breakfast, wandering alone around the parental farm. He ate his breakfast silently, and no one intruded upon him with any social expression of sympathy. Mrs. Heins saw that he had food and drink; the others talked around him as if he were not there. They merely made it a point not to speak of the murder. When he had finished he asked where the nearest telephone could be reached, and went out to find it. As soon as he was gone the hired man drifted in from nowhere for his breakfast.
In about an hour Murdock came back with the sheriff and asked for this hired man. ”

“ He let the sheriff take him back to the farm-house, hitch up a team, and drive him to the county jail. To all their questions he only mumbled, "He killed Roseyvelt!"
7 It came out at his trial that in the middle of corn-husking he had heard that Roosevelt was alive. He had wanted to leave at once on his pilgrimage to Oyster Bay. Old Murdock had said: "Alive nuthin'. I killed him myself. His body's hid in the attic over your bedroom." And, haunted insanely by that secret of the attic overhead, he had killed Murdock out of revenge. ”

“ But the man's threats and the death of the watch-dog alarmed the household. Murdock bolted his doors and windows at night and slept up-stairs on the floor of an unfinished room of the attic, with his gun beside him. And he carried the gun with him when he went to work in the fields.
That gun—a double-barreled shot-gun—was nowhere to be found. He had evidently stood it beside the kitchen door when he sat down to dinner. ”

“ He woke up in the morning clear-minded, but with no recollection of what had happened after the man had offered to cure his toothache. No one suspected that he had been hypnotized. When Wauchock found that its Herb Remedy was no cure for anything—not even for thirst—they supposed that Ben, being a "plum' idiot," had allowed the faker to persuade him that his toothache was better when it wasn't. Moreover, the toothache returned, and his mother had to take him to the dentist in Centerbrook to have the tooth out. His reputation as the village idiot was entirely established by the incident. ”

“ His father cried: "Guessed! Did you steal that sickle?" And in the end he beat the boy hi a rage, shouting: "I'll teach you to steal! I'll teach you!"
Now, in the account of the murder, there was one detail that had interested and puzzled me. When the sheriff asked Ben Murdock how he had thought of looking for the shot-gun under that particular stone in the wood-lot, Murdock replied that he had "just guessed" that it was there. And when I heard old Heins's story of the finding of the sickle I was struck by the coincidence. I guessed something myself. ”

“ Imagine: he had been born on that farm some thirty-five years before; he had had no schooling until he was nine; then, a hulking, slow-minded boy, he had joined the infants' class at the Wauchock village school, down the valley, and, in the ordinary course of education, he had progressed to the public school at Centerbrook. When he left school he went to work in a grocery at Centerbrook, and he moved from there to New York City, where he became bookkeeper for the Perry-Felton Company on William Street. ”

“ In the fall of 1910, during the hunting season, two shots were heard from the Murdock farm about midday. The neighbors thought nothing of it, or supposed that old Murdock was killing rabbits. In the middle of the afternoon the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Heins—a woman who was always "running the road," as they say in the valley—came to the Murdock kitchen door to borrow some mustard, as an emetic for her son, who had been eating "musharoons" that were behaving as if they were toadstools. She got no answer to her knock. ”

“ Hunting parties with shot-guns started out in all directions to seek his trail. He was found in the Murdock wood-lot, innocently cutting cedar-trees for fence-posts. He had been there since early morning; the shells of four hard-boiled eggs showed where he had eaten his luncheon, and the trees that he had cut and stripped were numerous enough to occupy a day's industry.
Heins said, suspiciously, "That's more wood 'n I ever seen a hired man cut in one day." ”

“ This is a serious matter—more serious than has been apprehended by the newspaper men who have been head-lining Murdock as the "Burbank of New Jersey." He has obtained his new species not merely by cross-fertilization and encouraging "sports," but by opposing his plants with adversities which they have had to overcome in order to survive. ”

“ He corked the bottle. "You take this, sonny, an' run home to yer mom, an' tell her if she ever has a toothache what to do with it. Go right to sleep as soon 's you get home, an' you'll wake up in the mornin' feelin' like a nest o' young robins, an' ready to start right off to school. Run along." He was helping Ben from the platform. "Right home. Get in out o' the night air. I don't want no neuraligy to strike into that jaw o' yourn. I want you at school as a proof to the great Indian Herb Remedy. ”

“ And naturally so. Murdock's hired men were notorious. He had been in the habit of engaging any tramp who came to his kitchen door, and, almost invariably, after working a few weeks, the man disappeared with anything that happened to be unprotected in the valley on the day of his departure. The news "Ol' Murdock's man's moved on" became the signal for a general stock-taking in the vicinity.
The last man had been caught with a stolen shotgun under his mattress before he had time to flee, and he was sent to jail as a vengeance on all those others who had escaped. ”

“ Ben did not answer. The man put a firm, cool hand under his chin, tilted his head back, and studied him.
"Toothache, eh?" he said. "Fine! This here's a suverin remedy for toothache. Also fer trouble with the eyes. This boy," he told the audience, "is near dead with toothache, an' it's afflictin' his eyes."
Ben began to blink. He was held facing a kerosene-torch that shone directly in his eyes.
"He can't look at a light without feelin' sleepy. He can't keep his eyes open. This here pain has worn him out. He's dog-tired. His eyes is tired." ”

“ It was a volume from a popular-science series that stated, in a simple way, the mystery of the origin of life in terms of evolution. It gave Benjamin McNeil Murdock his start. Scientific books began to take the place of puzzles on his bureau. ”

“ His father never interfered with him in any way; they hardly spoke. What his mother thought of it I do not know. Murdock has never talked of her. To the neighbors she seems to have been merely a lean, hard-faced, meager woman who struggled through a life of unceasing but inefficient drudgery, handicapped by the stupidity and shiftlessness of her "men-folk."
10 Of Ben Murdock in the village school I have found only one anecdote, and I got that from Sheriff Steiner in talking with him about the murder case. ”

“ Consequently he appears to find the cause of variation—and hence the origin of species—less in the outer pressure of the plant's environment than in the inner effort of the organism to adapt itself to changing conditions. ”

“ He owned a farm. He began to figure on how much it would cost him to live in the country; what was the best rate of interest he could get on a safe investment if he withdrew his money from the savings-bank and bought bonds; and what were the possibilities of scientific farming if he took it up.
12 Turning these things over in his mind, he was walking back from his office one August evening about half past six, when he passed the restaurant windows of a Fifth Avenue hotel and saw a young woman dining there with an elderly man behind the flowers of the window-sill boxes. ”