BENJAMIN McNEIL MURDOCK
said, menacingly, to his father, "You lemme go to school er I'll tell 'at you're stealin' things an' hidin' 'em in the hayloft."
He has explained, relating the incident: "I don't know what had come over me. I don't know how I knew what he'd been doing. I just said it—and then I felt as if I'd known it all along. I remember he looked at me as though I'd tried to stab him with the fork, and he dropped the milk-pail and ran out of the stable."
He was allowed to go to school. And very little good it seemed to do him. He was incurably dull at his books, although he was permitted to labor over them at home as much as he pleased. 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. It appears that Steiner was rather a bully in his school-days, and he "picked on Benny" as a proper butt, until one day in the winter Ben
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