“My little brother could get around amazingly well, even though he was blind, and he had a way of carrying father’s old fiddle with him into a grove not far from our house. One day I came home and found him crying himself sick over the fiddle, which had been smashed and ruined. He told me Bern Hayden had smashed the instrument.
“That night Hayden visited another boy, with whom he was very chummy. This other boy lived some distance outside the village, and I lay in wait for Hayden and stopped him as he was crossing lots on his way home. It was just getting dark, and the spot was lonely. It was light enough, just the same, for him to see my face, and I knew from his actions that he was frightened. I told him I was going to give him such a thumping that he’d remember it as long as he lived. He threatened me, but that didn’t stop me a bit, and I went for him.
“Hayden wasn’t such a slouch of a fighter, but he couldn’t hold his own with me, for I was bursting with rage. I got him down and was punishing him pretty bad when somehow he managed to get out his pocket knife and open it. He struck at me with the knife, and this is the result.”
Roger gave a cry as Ben again lifted a hand to his mutilated ear.
“He cut part of your ear off?” gasped Eliot.
Ben nodded. “Then I seemed to lose my reason entirely. I choked him until he was pretty nearly finished. As he lay limp and half dead on the ground, I stripped off his coat and vest and literally tore his shirt from his body. I placed him in a sitting posture on the ground, with his arms locked about the butt of a small tree, and tied his wrists together. With his own knife with which he had marked me for life, I cut a tough switch from a bush, and with that I gave it to him on his bare back until his screams brought two men, who seized and stopped me. I was so furious that I had not heard their approach. I was all covered with blood from my ear, and I sort of gave out all at once when the men grabbed me.
“I tell you, that affair kicked up some excitement in Hilton. My ear was cared for, but even while he dressed the wound the doctor told me that Lemuel Hayden would surely send me to the reform school. My mother fainted when she heard what had happened.
“I believe they would have sent me to the reform school right away had I not been taken violently ill the following day. Jerry told me that Bern Hayden was also in bed. I was just getting up when mother fell ill herself, and in three days she died. I think she died of a broken heart. Poor mother! Her whole life was one of hardships and disappointments.
“Uncle Asher, mother’s brother, arrived the day after mother died. He took charge of the funeral, but almost as soon as he stepped off the train in Hilton he heard what a bad boy I was, and he looked on me with disfavor.
“After the funeral Jerry came to me in the greatest excitement and told me he had heard Lemuel Hayden and Uncle Asher talking, and uncle had agreed that I should be sent to the Reformatory, as Mr. Hayden wished. Uncle said he would look out for Jerry, but I was to be carried off the next morning.