Originally published: Dec. 8, 1905
Genres: Children's
Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92540390-a-copper-harvest-or-the-boys-who-worked-a-deserted-mine
Gutenberg link: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67500
Chapters: 17
Warning: This may include outdated and derogatory language and attitudes.
CHAPTER I
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 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 a 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 a while 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 from 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 in 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 for 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 that 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 a while, 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 shortcuts 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 of 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 a while.”
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 tonight.”
“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.
Comments