Excerpt: ""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."