e rail!
Careful, careful! Now--now let her out; let her out! Go, you cripple,
go--" All the jargon of the turf.

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 G