He was a physical, nervous wreck, and the doctors said that he couldn’t last very long, for consumption had him.  It was only a matter of time, unless a miracle happened.  The breath of his life was going through his mouth and nostrils; the breath of his lungs.

No one knew his name at the hospital, not even himself.  There was nothing to identify him by.  For Garrison, after the blow that night, had managed to crawl out to the sidewalk like a wounded beast striving to find its lair and fighting to die game.

There was no one to say him nay, no friend to help him.  And hotel managements are notoriously averse to having murder or assault committed in their house.  So when they saw that Garrison was able to walk they let him go, and willingly.  Then he had collapsed, crumpled in a heap on the sidewalk.

A policeman had eventually found him, and with the uncanny acumen of his ilk had unerringly diagnosed the case as a “drunk.”  From the stationhouse to Bellevue, Garrison had gone his weary way, and from there, when it was finally discovered he was neither drunk nor insane, to Roosevelt Hospital.  And no one knew who or what he was, and no one cared overmuch.  He was simply one of the many unfortunate derelicts of a great city.

It was over six months before he left the hospital, cured so far as he could be.  The doctors called his complaint by a learned and villainously unpronounceable name, which, interpreted by the Bowery, meant that Billy Garrison “had gone dippy.”

But Garrison had not.  His every faculty was as acute as it ever had been.  Simply, Providence had drawn an impenetrable curtain over his memory, separating the past from the present; the same curtain that divides our presents from our futures.  He had no past.  It was a blank, shot now and then with a vague gleam of things dead and gone.

This oblivion may have been the manifestation of an all-wise Almighty.  Now, at least, he could not brood over past mistakes, though, unconsciously, he might have to live them out.  Life to him was a new book, not one mark appeared on its clean pages.  He did not even know his name—­nothing.

From the “W.  G.” on his linen he understood that those were his initials, but he could not interpret them; they stood for nothing.  He had no letters, memoranda in his pockets, bearing his name.  And so he took the name of William Good.  Perhaps the “William” came to him instinctively; he had no reason for choosing “Good.”

Garrison left the hospital with his cough, a little money the superintendent had kindly given to him, and his clothes; that was all.

Handicapped as he was, harried by futile attempts of memory to fathom his identity, he was about to renew the battle of life; not as a veteran, one who has earned promotion, profited by experience, but as a raw recruit.

The big city was no longer an old familiar mother, whose every mood and whimsy he sensed unerringly; now he was a stranger.  The streets meant nothing to him.  But when he first turned into old Broadway, a vague, uneasy feeling stirred within him; it was a memory struggling like an imprisoned bird to be free.  Almost the first person he met was Jimmy Drake.  Garrison was about to pass by, oblivious, when the other seized him by the arm.