BENJAMIN McNEIL MURDOCK
nine years old. And it began with the visit of a patent-medicine vender who drove into Wauchock from the direction of Pluckamin, in a gipsy wagon with two pinto ponies, selling an "Indian Herb Remedy" that was guaranteed to cure all known diseases, including baldness. He, in buckskins, and his wife, in a Carmen costume, gave a free entertainment of songs and sleight-of-hand, roping, knife-throwing, and Spanish dancing, at night, by the light of their kerosene-torches, and in the intervals between their acts they sold their Indian Herb Remedy.
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.
Nobody was buying. The faker, searching the upturned faces for a customer, saw the boy. Ben had been suffering all day with toothache; his face was swollen, and that may have attracted the man's notice. Mrs. Murdock had tried to ease her son's pain with horse liniment, a few drops of which she had put on the tooth itself; there had probably
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