Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/167

 crowd with the bottle of medicine clasped to his bosom.

"The price o' this mirac'lous med'cine to-night is a quarter of a dollar. Thank you, partner. Here we are. Who's next?"

And Ben stumbled off down the road toward his home in the dark, like a sleep-walker, while all Wauchock behind him reached out its hands for that mirac'lous Herb Remedy.

It was a very dazed-looking boy who returned to the Murdock kitchen, carrying a bottle of patent medicine instead of a jug of kerosene. And at his mother's cry of, "What you got there? Where's the coal-oil?" he put the bottle on the kitchen table, sat down unsteadily, and dropped forward, his head on his arms, in a sleep from which she could not wake him. She put him to bed, scolding him distractedly.

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