"Come out of this, Bob!" he cried in a choking voice. "You'll report nothing! You'd better not monkey with those fellows. That young Irish ruffian was improvising as he went along. And I'm awfully sorry, Bobby dear, but I'm afraid I've won my bet," he added, allowing his laughter to overcome him, "because--because--oh, Holy Maria, hold me up, I'm going to die!--because Big Scalper speaks a language that's amazingly like the stuff the pipers of the Black Watch jabber to one another!" As Scotty moved down to the landing he gave his tormentor a good-humoured shaking. "It's lots of fun, I know, Dan; but you'd better keep that long, Irish tongue of yours still before the officers, or you'll get into trouble. I don't know what that fellow's going to do." "Be jabers, it would be worth pickin' oakum for a year jist to take down his blamed consate. Did ye iver see such a banty rooster as the young wasp was? The little sailor chap wasn't half bad. And, say, Scot, did ye hear him say he was a Canadian or from Canady, or somethin' like that? It accounts for his good manners." "Who, the bluejacket?" Scotty looked with interest after the young man's retreating form. There was something in his trim, straight figure that somehow seemed familiar. "What's his name, I wonder?" he began, when a peremptory order interrupted. "Stanwell, into number 150!" cried the sharp voice of the overseer, and Scotty sprang into the stern of the boat and was off for his first battle with the cataracts of the Nile. XV THE SECRET OF THE NILE O mystic Nile! Thy secret yields Before us; thy most ancient dreams Are mixed with far Canadian fields And murmur of Canadian streams. --C. D. G. ROBERTS. The awe-inspiring designation which Dan had bestowed upon his friend was not readily dropped. The Canadians seized and used it joyfully. Others who heard the name and were not aware of the joke in which it originated supposed that the bearer of it was really an Indian chief, about whose bloody prowess they were ready to believe any tales which the ingenious Mr. Murphy might invent. And so, for the remainder of the voyage, Scotty was known throughout the column as Big Scalper, the fiercest Indian from the Canadian wilds.