Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/170

 said to him, "You hit me again an' I'll tell 'em you're wearin' yer sister's made-over underclothes."

As the sheriff says: "It knocked me all of a heap. I'd 'a' died rather 'n have any one know it. You know the way a boy feels 'bout things like that. Well, I let Benny alone after that, you bet."

And of this incident I could get no explanation. Murdock did not remember it. He did not remember that Sterner had "picked" on him. He believed that the sheriff was confusing him with some other boy.

What he did remember was this: When he began to study arithmetic he was unknowingly a "mathematical prodigy," like the famous Gauss and the more famous Ampère. He used to do a problem by first putting down the answer and then working back to the solution. How he knew the answers he cannot now explain. "I lost the trick after a while," he says. "At first I could do it sometimes, and then sometimes I couldn't. And then I lost it altogether. I can still add up a column of figures by running my eye up it and keeping my mind a blank. The figures add themselves for me if I don't interfere with them. That's how I came to be a book-keeper."

He lost, for a time, even that small remnant of his ability as a "calculating boy" during his years at the Centerbrook school. And he lost it as a result of a whipping which the teacher gave him.

It seems that the class had been set an unusually