least I
think that's the name. Well, as you ken the house, you've maybe noticed
a laddie that bides there too?"

"There's no laddie," began Corp, "except--"

"Let me see," interrupted Tommy, "what was his name? Was it Peter? No.
Was it Willie? Stop, I mind, it was Tommy."

He glared so that Corp dared not utter a word.

"Have you notitched him?"

"I've--I've seen him," Corp gasped.

"Well, this is the joke," said Tommy, trying vainly to restrain his
mirth, "Cathro thinks I'm that laddie! Ho! ho! ho!"

Corp scratched his head, then he bit his warts, then he spat upon his
hands, then he said "Damn."

The crisis came when Cathro, still ignorant that the heather was on
fire, dropped some disparaging remarks about the Stuarts to his history
class. Tommy said nothing, but--but one of the school-windows was
without a snib, and next morning when the dominie reached his desk he
was surprised to find on it a little cotton glove. He raised it on high,
greatly puzzled, and then, as ever when he suspected knavery, his eyes
sought Tommy, who was sitting on a form, his arms proudly folded. That
the whelp had put the glove there, Cathro no longer doubted, and he
would have liked to know why, but was reluctant to give him the
satisfaction of asking. So the gauntlet--for gauntlet it was--was laid
aside, the while Tommy, his head humming like a beeskep, muttered
triumphantly through his teeth, "But he lifted it, he lifted it!" and at
closing time it was flung in his face with this fair tribute:

"I'm no a rich man, laddie, but I would give a pound note to know what
you'll be at ten years from now."

There could be no mistaking the dire meaning of these words, and Tommy
hurried, pale but determined, to the quarry, where Corp, with a barrow
in his hands, was learning strange phrases by heart, and finding it a
help to call his warts after the new swears.

"Corp," cried Tommy, firmly, "I've set sail!"

On the following Saturday evening Charles Edward landed in the Den. In
his bonnet was the white cockade, and round his waist a tartan sash;
though he had long passed man's allotted span his face was still full of
fire, his figure lithe and even boyish. For state reasons he had assumed
the name of Captain Stroke. As he leapt ashore from the bark, the
Dancing Shovel, he was received right loyally by Corp and other faithful
adherents, of whom only two, and these of a sex to which his House was
ever partial, were visible, owing to t