oulders and wagged one finger at him. 'No oath o' yourn!' the boy
repeated. 'God knows who ye be or why it is so. But I ha' heard ye ha'
my neck in a noose; I ha' heard ye be dangerous. Yet, before God, I
swear in your teeth that if I meet this man to his face, or come upon
his filthy back, drunk, awake, asleep, I will run him through the
belly and send his soul to hell. He had me, a gentleman's son, basted
by a hind!'

This long speech exhausted his breath, and he fell back panting.

'I had as soon ye had my head as not,' he muttered desperately, 'since
I have been basted.'

'Why,' Throckmorton answered, 'for your private troubles, I know
naught of them. There may be some that will thank ye or advance ye for
spitting of this gallant. But I am not one of them. Nevertheless will
I be your friend, whom ye would have served better an ye could.'

He smiled in his inward manner and went to polishing of his nails. A
little later he felt the bruises on the boy's arms, and stayed the
barge for a moment the stage where, swiftly, eight oarsmen took the
places of the eight that had rowed two shifts out of three--stayed the
barge for time enough to purchase for the boy a ham, a little ginger,
some raw eggs and sack.

The barge rushed forward, with the jar of oars and the sound, like
satin tearing, of the water at the bows, across the ruffled reaches of
the broad waters. The gilded roofs, the gabled fronts of the palace at
Greenwich called Placentia, winked in the fresh sunlight. Throckmorton
had a great fever of excitement, but having sworn to let his oarsmen
be scourged with leathern thongs if they made no more efforts, he lay
back upon the purple cushions and toyed with the strings of the yellow
ensign that floated behind them. It was his purpose to put heart in
the boy and to feed his rage, so that alternately he promised to give
him the warding of the Queen's door--a notable advancement--or
assented to the lad's gloom when he said that he was fit only for the
stables, having been beaten by a groom. So that at the quay the boy
sprang forth mightily, swaying the boat behind him. The trace of his
sea-sickness had left him; he swore to tear Culpepper's throat apart
as if it had been capon flesh.

Throckmorton swiftly quartered the gardens, sending, in his passage
beneath the tall palace arch, a dozen men to search all the paths for
any drunkards that might there lie hidden. He sent the young Poins to
search the three alehous