too. I always am."

Jo brought him some milk and bread in a bowl. When the sick man had
eaten and drunk the bowlful to the last drop and crumb, he lay back with
a sigh of content, but trembling from weakness and the strain, though
Jo's hand had been under his head, and he had been fed like a little
child.

All day he lay and watched Jo as he worked, as he came and went.
Sometimes he put his hand to his head and said to Jo: "It hurts." Then
Jo would cool the wound with fresh water from the mountain spring, and
he would drag down the bowl to drink from it greedily.

It was as though he could never get enough water to drink. So the first
day in the hut at Vadrome Mountain passed without questioning on the
part of either Charley Steele or his host.

With good reason. Jo Portugais saw that memory was gone; that the past
was blotted out. He had watched that first terrible struggle of memory
to reassert itself, as the eyes mechanically looked out upon new and
strange surroundings, but it was only the automatic habit of the sight,
the fumbling of the blind soul in its cell-fumbling for the latch which
it could not find, for the door which would not open. The first day on
the raft, as Charley had opened his eyes upon the world again after
that awful night at the Cote Dorion, Jo. had seen that same blank
uncomprehending look--as it were, the first look of a mind upon the
world. This time he saw, and understood what he saw, and spoke as men
speak, but with no knowledge or memory behind it--only the involuntary
action of muscle and mind repeated from the vanished past.

Charley Steele was as a little child, and having no past, and
comprehending in the present only its limited physical needs and
motions, he had no hope, no future, no understanding. In three days he
was upon his feet, and in four he walked out of doors and followed Jo
into the woods, and watched him fell a tree and do a woodsman's work.
Indoors he regarded all Jo did with eager interest and a pleased,
complacent look, and readily did as he was told. He seldom spoke--not
above three or four times a day, and then simply and directly, and only
concerning his wants. From first to last he never asked a question, and
there was never any inquiry by look or word. A hundred and twenty miles
lay between him and his old home, between him and Kathleen and Billy and
Jean Jolicoeur's saloon, but between him and his past life the unending
miles of eternity intervened. He was r