Nicholas Hogben fetched a leather bottle as long as his leg, dusty and dinted, but nevertheless bedight with the arms of England, from the stone recess where the guard sheltered at nights. He fitted it on to the crook of his pike by the handle, and, craning over the drawbridge, first smoothed away the leaf-green duck-weed on the moat and then sank the bottle in the black water.
'I have money: a main of money for ye,' the young Poins said to Thomas Culpepper; but the man, with his red beard and white face, swayed on his legs and had ears only for the gurgling and gulping of the water as it entered the bottle neck. The black jack swayed and jumped below the bridge like a glistening water-beast.
He had little green spangles of duck-weed in his orange beard when he took the bottle away, empty, from his mouth. He drew deep gasps of breath, and suddenly sat down upon a squared block of stone that the masons above were waiting to hoist into place over the archway.
'Good water!' he grunted to Hogben—grunting as all the Lincolnshire men did, in those days, like a two-year hog.
'Bean't but that good in all Calais town!' Hogben grunted back to him. 'Curses on the two wurmen that sent me here.' And indeed, to Lincolnshire men the water tasted good, since it reminded them of their dyke water, tasting of marshweed and smelling of eggs.
'Tü wurmen!' Culpepper said lazily. 'Hast thou been jigging with tü puticotties to wunst? One is enow to undo seven men. Who be 'hee?'
The young Poins, with a sulky sense of his importance, uttered:
'I have money for thee—a main of money!'
Culpepper looked at him with sleepy blue eyes.
'Thrice y' ha' told me that,' he said. 'And money is a goodly thing in its place—but not to a man with a bellyful of water. Y' shall feel my fist when I be rested. Meanwhile wait and, being a cub, hear how men talk.' He slapped his chest and repeated to Hogben: 'Who be 'ee?'