 The narrator details how, when he was three, his widowed mother was charmed by and took in a man — then an eighteen-year-old "rake and...roustabout" — charming at first but later revealed as a gambler and womanizer.The rake then disappeared, leaving the narrator's mother to die of tuberculosis in penury after their home was seized to pay off the debts the man left behind.On her deathbed, she instructs the boy to avenge her death, telling him