ting strongly
with the feeble accents of his immediate superior, the wounded
sergeant.

"Then I have something that must be told you, lieutenant, something
Miss Harvey already has an inkling of, for she has met and known my
dear mother. If this pain continue to increase, and fever set in, I
may be unable to tell it later. Some of the men thought I had enlisted
under an alias, lieutenant, but they were wrong. Wing is my rightful
name. My father was chief officer of the old 'Flying Cloud' in the
days when American clipper ships beat the world. The gold fever seized
him, though, and he quit sailing and went to mining in the early 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 m