But he had been ruined, too, by Thomas Culpepper, who had sold Durford and Maintree and Sallowford—which last was Hogben's father's farm. For why? Selling the farm had let in a Lincoln lawyer, and the Lincoln lawyer had set the farm to sheep, which last had turned old Hogben, the father, out from his furrows to die in a ditch—there being no room for farmers and for sheep upon one land. It had sent old Hogben, the father, to die in a ditch; it had sent his daughters to the stews and his sons to the road for sturdy beggars. So that, but for Wallop's band passing that way when Hogben was grinning through the rope beneath Lincoln town tree—but for the fact that men were needed for Wallop's work in Calais, by the holy blood of Hailes! Hogben would have been rating the angel's head in Paradise.
But there had been great call for men to man the walls there in Calais, so Wallop's ancient had written his name down on the list, beneath the gallows tree, and had taken him away from the Sheriff of Lincoln's man.
'So here a be,' he drawled, 'cutting little holes in my pikehead.'
''Tis a folly,' the young Poins said.
'Sir,' the Lincolnshire man answered, 'you say 'tis a folly to make small holes in a pikehead. But for me 'tis the greatest of ornaments. Give you, it weakens the pikehead; but 'tis a gradely ornament.'
'Ornaments be folly,' the young Poins reiterated.
'Sir,' the Lincolnshire man answered again, 'there is the goodliest folly that ever was. For if I weaken my eyes and tire my wrists with small tappers and little files, and if I weaken the steel with small holes, each hole represents a woman I have known undone and cast down in her pride by a man. Here be sixty-and-four holes round and firm in a pattern. Sixty-and-four women I have known undone.'
He paused and surveyed, winking and moving the scroll that the little holes made in the tough steel of his axehead. Where a perforation was not quite round, he touched it with his file.
'Hum! ha!' he gloated. 'In the centre of the head is the master hole of all, planned out for being cut. But not yet cut! Mark you, 'tis not yet cut. That is for the woman I hate most of all women. She is not yet cast down that I have heard tell on, though some have said "Aye," some "Nay." Tell me, have you heard yet of a Kat Howard in the stews?'
'There is a Kat Howard is like to be——' the young Poins began. But his slow cunning was aroused before he had the sentence out. Who could tell what trick was this?