FROM THE LIFE
nary than such a history? Could you believe that, beneath the superficies of these incidents, there was hidden one of those romances that life delights to invent, perversely, in order to confound the realities of fiction? No. No more could I. Murdock might be a great naturalist, a peasant genius, another Pasteur, but there was obviously nothing in him to repay prospecting by a short-story writer. I gave him up. And then, unexpectedly, in gossip about the details of that murder trial, I came on traces of fiction's precious metal, followed it, placer-mining, up the course of his history, and located an incredibly rich mother-lode.
5
Take, first, the story of the murder as I dug it out—and found it pay dirt.
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. In her anxiety about her son she opened the door to call through the house, and she saw old Murdock
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