ned to move his
hands, and they hurt. He squinted at them, but failed to recognize them,
so puffed were they by the mosquito virus. He was lost, or rather, his
identity was lost to him. There was nothing familiar about him, which,
by association of ideas, would cause to rise in his consciousness the
continuity of his existence. He was divorced utterly from his past, for
there was nothing about him to resurrect in his consciousness a memory of
that past. Besides, he was so sick and miserable that he lacked energy
and inclination to seek after who and what he was.

It was not until he discovered a crook in a little finger, caused by an
unset breakage of years before, that he knew himself to be Marcus
O'Brien. On the instant his past rushed into his consciousness. When he
discovered a blood-blister under a thumb-nail, which he had received the
previous week, his self-identification became doubly sure, and he knew
that those unfamiliar hands belonged to Marcus O'Brien, or, just as much
to the point, that Marcus O'Brien belonged to the hands. His first
thought was that he was ill--that he had had river fever. It hurt him so
much to open his eyes that he kept them closed. A small floating branch
struck the boat a sharp rap. He thought it was some one knocking on the
cabin door, and said, "Come in." He waited for a while, and then said
testily, "Stay out, then, damn you." But just the same he wished they
would come in and tell him about his illness.

But as he lay there, the past night began to reconstruct itself in his
brain. He hadn't been sick at all, was his thought; he had merely been
drunk, and it was time for him to get up and go to work. Work suggested
his mine, and he remembered that he had refused ten thousand dollars for
it. He sat up abruptly and squeezed open his eyes. He saw himself in a
boat, floating on the swollen brown flood of the Yukon. The
spruce-covered shores and islands were unfamiliar. He was stunned for a
time. He couldn't make it out. He could remember the last night's orgy,
but there was no connection between that and his present situation.

He closed his eyes and held his aching head in his hands. What had
happened? Slowly the dreadful thought arose in his mind. He fought
against it, strove to drive it away, but it persisted: he had killed
somebody. That alone could explain why he was in an open boat drifting
down the Yukon. The law of Red Cow that he had so long administ