days of San Francisco, and there when I was a little boy of ten he died, leaving mother with not many thousand dollars to take care of herself and me.  ‘You will have your brother to help you’ were words he spoke the last day of his life, and even then I noted how little comfort mother seemed to find in that fact.  It was only a few months after father’s death that Uncle Fred, from being an occasional visitor, came to living with us all the time, made his home there, though seldom within doors night or day.  He was several years younger than mother.  He was the youngest, it seems, of the family, ‘the baby,’ and had been petted and spoiled from earliest infancy.  I soon found why he came.  Mother was often in tears, Uncle Fred always begging or demanding money.  The boys at school twitted me about my gambler uncle, though I’ve no doubt their fathers gambled as much as he.  These were just before the early days of the great war that sprang up in ’61 and that we boys out on the Pacific coast only vaguely understood.  Sometimes Uncle Fred came home drunk and I could hear him threatening poor mother, and things went from bad to worse, and one night when I was just thirteen I was awakened from sound sleep by her scream.  In an instant I flew to her room, catching up as I ran father’s old bowie-knife that always hung by my door.  In the dim light I saw her lying by the bedside, a man bending over and choking her.  With all my strength I slashed at him just as he turned.  I meant to kill, but the turn saved him.  He sprang to his feet with an oath and cry and rushed to the wash-stand.  I had laid Uncle Fred’s cheek open from ear to chin.

“It was long before mother could check the flow of the blood.  It sobered him, of course, and made him piteously weak.  For days after that she nursed and cared for him, but forbade my entering the room.  Men came to see him,—­insisted on seeing him,—­and she would send me to the bank for gold and pay their claims and bid them go.  At last he was able to walk out with that awful slash on his thin white face.  Once then he met and cursed me, but I did not mind, I had acted only to save mother.  How could I suppose that her assailant was her own brother?  Then finally with sobs and tears she told me the story, how he had been their mother’s darling, how wild and reckless was his youth, how her mother’s last thought seemed to be for him, and how on her knees she, my own mother, promised to take care of poor Freddie and shield him from every ill, and this promise she repeated to me, bidding me help her keep it and to conceal as far as I could her brother’s misdeeds.  For a few months things went a little better.  Uncle Fred got a commission in a California regiment towards the close of the war and was sent down to Arizona.  Then came more tears and trouble.  I couldn’t understand it all then, but I do now.  Uncle Fred was gambling again, drawing on her for means to meet his losses.  The old home went under the hammer, and we moved down to San Diego, where