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"The loose clay heaved. I jumped back. Out of the loose earth, out of the shallow grave, rose Rocusek."
WOULD anyone engage a doctor who admitted that he had buried another patient alive? Especially when he admitted that he had buried the patient to hide the evidence of murder?
Hardly! That doctor would be looked on as a monster in human form. The world would shrink from him as it would shrink from a leper or from an unclean beast.
That is why I am revealing myself only as "Doctor X."
For I did that thing. I buried a man alive. I did it to shield myself from punishment for his murder.
Anyone else would have done the same thing, under the same circumstances. That's why I'm telling this story—this story of what actually took place in my own life. I want to show how appearances may put a man in the shadow of the hangman's noose.
I am a reputable physician. I was graduated from a medical school which is rated in "Class A" by the American Medical Association. I stood fifth from the top in the class of 1899.
Soon after I arrived in the city where I now live, on the banks of the upper Mississippi River, I acquired the enmity of a rival, whom I shall call Dr. Rocusek. Little did I know what horrible results his enmity was to bring upon me!
He was a man of peculiar nature, a mixture of a half-dozen European races. He was almost a genius in his profession, and had been highly educated, but his strange moods cost him many friends, and when I invaded his field many of his patients naturally drifted to me. Like myself, he was a specialist in nervous and mental diseases.
