BENJAMIN McNEIL MURDOCK
collapsed in his seat at the table "in a mucks of blood," and Mrs. Murdock lying across an inner threshold of the room "all of a heap an' bleedin' like a pig-killin'." She ran screaming back to her son. He hurried to the Murdock farm, and she went spreading the alarm down the valley.
"By gosh!" he said, afterward, "it cured me, it did. I never knowed I was sick till it was all over—an' then I wasn't."
Murdock's hired man was missing. He was at once suspected. 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. His successor was a half-witted wanderer who said he was on his way to visit "Roseyvelt." Old Murdock told him that Roosevelt was dead, and the man—with his mainspring broken—seemed unable to go any farther. Murdock hired him for his board and a package of fine-cut a week. Now he had "moved."
Hunting parties with shot-guns started out in
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