eat by a boor!' He broke off and began again. 'God curse you and
the day I saw you! God curse Kat Howard and the day I carried her
letter! God curse my sister Margot and the day she gar'd me carry the
letters! And may a swift death of the pox take off Kat Howard's
cousin--may he rot and stink through the earth above his grave. He
would not fight with me, but aboard a ship when I was sick set a
Lincolnshire logget to beat me, a gentleman's son!'

'Why, thy gentility shall survive it,' Throckmorton said. 'But an it
will not have more beating to its back, ye shall tell me where ye left
T. Culpepper.'

'At Greenwich,' said the young Poins, and vomited forth curses. The
old woman came from her pots to peer at the plasters on his skull, and
then returned to the fire gibbering and wailing that she was not in
that house plasters for to make.

'Knave,' Throckmorton said, 'an ye will not tell me your tale swiftly
ye shall right now to the Tower. It is life and death to a leaden
counter an I find not Culpepper ere nightfall.'

The young Poins stretched forth his arm and groaned.

'Part is bruises and part is sickness of the waves,' he muttered; 'but
if I make not shift to slit his weazand ere nightfall, pox take all my
advancement for ever. I will tell my weary tale.'

Throckmorton paused, held his head down, fingered his beard, and said:

'When left ye him at Greenwich?'

'This day at dawn,' Poins answered, and cursed again.

'Drunk or sober?'

'Drunk as a channel codfish.'

The old woman came, a sheaf of jack-knives in her arms, muttering
along the table.

'Get you to bed,' she croaked. 'I will not ha' warmed new sheets for
thee, and thee not use them. Get thee to bed.'

Throckmorton pushed her back, and caught the boy by the jacket near
the throat.

'Ye shall tell me the tale as we go,' he said, and punctuated his
words by shakes. 'But, oaf that I trusted to do a man's work, ye swing
beneath a tree this night an we find not the man ye failed to stay.'

The young Poins--he panted out the story as he trotted, wofully
keeping pace to Throckmorton's great strides between the hedges--had
stuck to Culpepper as to his shadow, in Calais town. At each turn he
had showed the warrant to be master of the lighters; he had handed
over the gold that Throckmorton had given him. But Culpepper had
turned a deaf ear to him, and, setting up a violent friendship with
the Lincolnshire gatewarden over pots of beer in a brewhouse, h