BACK TO LIFE.
“He’s the most lifelike corpse I ever saw in my life, and I’ve seen
several in my time,” said Jack Howard, a stalwart, bronze-featured boy
of seventeen. He looked down at the body stretched out on a slate slab
in the center of the little surgery at the rear of Dr. Phineas Fox’s
drugstore in the town of Sackville, Neb.
“He certainly does look natural--not at all like the usual run of
subjects that find their way in here occasionally,” admitted his friend
and chum, Charlie Fox, the doctor’s son, holding the kerosene lamp he
carried in his hand well up, so as to bring the dead man into full
relief.
“What would you imagine he died of?”
“Want of breath,” snickered Charlie, raising one of the corpse’s arms
and then letting it fall back on the slab with a flop.
“Funny boy,” grinned Jack.
“Well, he dropped dead up at Mugging’s farm, where he stopped this
morning and asked for something to eat. Of course he was sent here for
father to hold a post-mortem on to determine the cause of death.”
Charlie’s father was the leading physician in Sackville.
He also officiated as coroner in all cases of sudden death occurring in
the county.
At the present time he was absent on a similar kind of a case at a
village some distance away, and was not expected back until late that
night.
The doctor and his family lived in a neat little cottage, divided from
his drugstore by the garden, and he was generally considered well-to-do.
Sackville was a town of some three or four thousand inhabitants, with
outlying farms and farmhouses.
It was the county seat, and, being the largest place in the county,
country people for miles around traded at its stores.
A good-sized river skirted its northern boundary, and the traffic in
that direction made Sackville quite a lively place, and consequently of
some local importance.
Jack Howard was a lad of good family whose people lived in New York.
A close student, too intense application to his studies had undermined
his general health, and the family physician recommended that he
be sent out West to rough it awhile on the large farm of a distant
relative in Nebraska.
This farm was about three miles outside of Sackville.
Jack had already lived and worked like an ordinary farmhand on his
relative’s place for the best part of a year, and his new life had
made an altogether different looking boy of him--so much so, indeed,
that his parents and friends in the East could hardly recognize the
photograph of himself which he had lately sent them.
He often came to Sackville; and, being a genial, whole-souled kind of a
boy, had made himself popular with all with whom he came in contact.
This was particularly the case with Charlie Fox, who instantly took an
uncommon fancy to him, and the consequence was that they became chums.
Charlie had just graduated at the Sackville high school.
He had taken up the study of medicine under his father a year or so
before, as the old gentleman intended his son should be his successor,
and Charlie rather liked the profession.
His father proposed to send him to a medical school at Omaha soon,
where he would get hospital practice.
Jack had come in to visit Charlie that afternoon, and as a matter of
course he stayed to supper.
Mrs. Fox and her daughter Flora had received him with their usual
hospitality, and after the meal the ladies and the two boys had put in
a very pleasant evening.
About the time Howard was thinking of mounting his horse to ride back
to the farm a fierce thunder and lightning storm had swooped down on
the town, and so Jack was easily persuaded to postpone his departure
until morning, to Charlie a great satisfaction, for he never tired of
the society of his friend.
As soon as Charlie’s sister and mother went upstairs for the night the
budding medicus proposed to his chum that they visit the surgery and
inspect the corpse.
This gruesome suggestion meeting Jack’s approbation, they put on their
hats and made a dash across the garden through the rain.
Charlie lit the surgery lamp and then turned down the sheet which had
hidden the body from view.
It was then that Jack made the remark with which this chapter opens.
“Does your mother and sister know that this body is here?” asked Jack.
“No,” replied Charlie, shaking his head.
“Would it bother them any?”
“Well, they’re rather delicate about having dead ones so close at hand.
Pop always keeps these things a secret; they never have the least idea
there’s going to be an inquest till the jurors come--and not always
then.”
“Put the lamp on that bracket, Charlie.”
“You don’t mind staying in here awhile, then?” said his friend, in a
tone of satisfaction, as he placed the lamp on its rest, where the
rays diffused a soft light around the little room and upon the various
bottles and packages with their strange and peculiarly smelling
contents.
“Not in the least,” answered Jack, heartily, pulling out a small
briar-root pipe and a package of short cut and preparing to have a
smoke.
“Glad to hear it. Some fellows would have the creeps at the idea of
staying in this place with a corpse.”
“It doesn’t worry me in the least,” said Jack. “As for you, I suppose
you are used to such things.”
“I see ’em occasionally, but not often enough to suit me,” replied
Charlie, with professional enthusiasm. “In the last three months,
however, I helped Mold, the undertaker, to lay out half a dozen of his
cases, just to get used to handling dead bodies. I don’t want to be at
all squeamish when I come to cut up parts of subjects on the dissecting
table at Omaha. The old-timers there always have the joke on the
newcomers, and as my father is a surgeon, I don’t want to disgrace the
family, you know.”
“That’s right. Gee, what a crash!”
Jack walked over to the window, drew the curtain aside, and glanced out
into the storm, which was now getting in its fine work with a vengeance.
“I’ll bet that bolt struck a house or barn not far away,” nodded the
embryo medical student.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” replied Jack, as he came back to the center
of the room and viewed the face of the dead man meditatively, as if he
was wondering what sort of a character he had been in life.
The corpse was that of an apparently well-nourished man of about fifty
years of age; the bearded features were coarse and rugged, as if he had
roughed it upon the plains or in the mountains of the West.
“Looks as if he might have been a miner, eh, Charlie?” suggested Jack.
“Yes, or a prospector, or something of that sort.”
“Or maybe a ranchman.”
“Sure; or a bad man from Piute Flat, or some other tough joint in the
wild and woolly.”
“Hardly that,” objected his chum. “It is not a bad face, by any
means. I don’t think I should be afraid to trust a fellow with his
physiognomy.”
“You have more confidence in his face than I have, then. I prefer the
civilized man every day in the year.”
“For looks, yes; but as for character--well, there are a good many
undesirable individuals walking the streets of our big cities in fine
linen and broadcloth to whom, I dare say, this poor fellow could give
cards and spades in a lesson in morality. You can’t always judge a book
by its cover, old chap.”
“That isn’t any lie, either,” admitted Charlie.
The young medical student had produced a cigarette from a flat, square
box he kept hidden away in some mysterious pocket in his jacket, and
lighting it, began to fill the surgery with the odor of Turkish tobacco.
“I see you smoke coffin-nails occasionally,” said Jack, beaming upon
his friend. “Does the old gentleman stand for that sort of thing?”
“Hardly,” answered Charlie, with a sly wink. “I have to keep ’em out of
sight when he’s around. I only tackle one once in awhile.”
Both boys smoked in silence for a moment or two, listening to the
steady downpour of the rain on the tin roof, and the intermingled peals
of thunder.
The vivid glare of the lightning was apparent in spite of the glow of
the lamp.
“You’d have caught it in the neck if you had gone home to-night.”
“I’d have caught it all over, you mean,” grinned Jack. “By the way, you
have a galvanic battery handy?”
“Yes. What do you want to do with it?” asked his chum, in some surprise.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Howard, confidentially. “This corpse looks
so confounded lifelike that I can’t quite get it out of my head that
maybe he isn’t as dead as he appears to be. It might be a case of
suspended animation, for all you know.”
“I never thought of that,” replied Charlie, in a startled tone. “I’ll
test him right away, though I guess he’s dead, all right. Father would
do that before he used the knife on him.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to apply a stethoscope over his heart. Then I’ll try the eye
test.”
“Better get the battery and try that. If it doesn’t produce results
I’ll believe this man is as dead as a door-nail.”
Charlie stepped to the door leading to the boxlike room at the rear of
the place.
“Meyer,” he called.
A short, round-faced German boy answered the hail.
“Vell, Sharlie, vot is der trouble mit you?”
“You know where our galvanic battery is, don’t you?”
“I ped you,” grinned the boy.
“Is it ready for use?”
“Yaw, I dink so.”
“Fetch it into the surgery.”
“So. I bed me your friend Yack is by the surgery, too, ain’d it?”
“Yes, he’s there, all right.”
“Und you vants der battery? You blay some shokes upon dot dead mans,
ain’d it?”
“Never mind about that. Just do as I tell you,” and Charlie closed the
door.
In a couple of minutes Meyer Dinkelspeil, Dr. Fox’s boy of all work in
the shop, came in with the box containing the battery.
“Put it down here, Meyer,” said Jack. “You connect the wire, Charlie,
while I turn the battery. Put the handles in the hands of the corpse.”
“They are rigid.”
“Place them between the fingers, then, and hold them tight,” said Jack.
“Chimmnay cribs!” exclaimed Meyer, looking on with wide open eyes. “You
dink dot you voke him up mit dot foolishness?”
“Well, if we don’t we’ll try it on you afterwards,” grinned Charlie.
“You vill I don’d t’ink,” replied the German boy.
The apparatus being in place, Jack turned the electric current on.
Every moment the friction became brisker and the power stronger.
All at once the supposed corpse opened its eyes, which rolled in a
strange manner.
Then a convulsive movement shook the body, the hands and feet twitched,
and the jaw moved slightly.
“B’gee!” exclaimed Jack, “the man isn’t dead at all.”
“Shumping Moses!” ejaculated Meyer, almost frightened out of his skin.
“Let me ouid!” and he made a rush for the door and disappeared.
“What a chump I was not to have tried that this morning when they
fetched him in here,” said Charlie, as his chum stopped turning the
crank of the galvanic battery. “It was a partial failure of the heart’s
action, producing a trancelike state. Wait; I’ll get some brandy.”
He rushed into the store, measured out a gill of it, returned, and
poured it down the man’s throat.
The effect was instantaneous.
He who but five minutes before had been considered a corpse had
actually come back to animation.