Robert Jordan handed the glasses to Anselmo who lay flat beside him. The old man grinned and shook his head. He tapped his skull beside his eye with one finger.
«‘Ya lo veo’,» he said in Spanish. «I have seen him,» speaking from the front of his mouth with almost no movement of his lips in the way that is quieter than any whisper. He looked at the sentry as Robert Jordan smiled at him and, pointing with one finger, drew the other across his throat. Robert Jordan nodded but he did not smile.
The sentry box at the far end of the bridge faced away from them and down the road and they could not see into it. The road, which was broad and oiled and well constructed, made a turn to the left at the far end of the bridge and then swung out of sight around a curve to the right. At this point it was enlarged from the old road to its present width by cutting into the solid bastion of the rock on the far side of the gorge; and its left or western edge, looking down from the pass and the bridge, was marked and protected by a line of upright cut blocks of stone where its edge fell sheer away to the gorge. The gorge was almost a canyon here, where the brook, that the bridge was flung over, merged with the main stream of the pass.
«And the other post?» Robert Jordan asked Anselmo.
«Five hundred meters below that turn. In the roadmender’s hut that is built into the side of the rock.»
«How many men?» Robert Jordan asked.
He was watching the sentry again with his glasses. The sentry rubbed his cigarette out on the plank wall of the box, then took a leather tobacco pouch from his pocket, opened the paper of the dead cigarette and emptied the remnant of used tobacco into the pouch. The sentry stood up, leaned his rifle against the wall of the box and stretched, then picked up his rifle, slung it over his shoulder and walked out onto the bridge. Anselmo flattened on the ground and Robert Jordan slipped his glasses into his shirt pocket and put his head well behind the pine tree.
«There are seven men and a corporal,» Anselmo said close to his ear. «I informed myself from the gypsy.»
«We will go now as soon as he is quiet,» Robert Jordan said. «We are too close.»
«Hast thou seen what thou needest?»
«Yes. All that I need.»
It was getting cold quickly now with the sun down and the light was failing as the afterglow from the last sunlight on the mountains behind them faded.
«How does it look to thee?» Anselmo said softly as they watched the sentry walk across the bridge toward the other box, his bayonet bright in the last of the afterglow, his figure unshapely in the blanket coat.
«Very good,» Robert Jordan said. «Very, very good.»
«I am glad,» Anselmo said. «Should we go? Now there is no chance that he sees us.»
The sentry was standing, his back toward them, at the far end of the bridge. From the gorge came the noise of the stream in the boulders. Then through this noise came another noise, a steady, racketing drone and they saw the sentry looking up, his knitted cap slanted back, and turning their heads and looking up they saw, high in the evening sky, three monoplanes in V formation, showing minute and silvery at that height where there still was sun, passing unbelievably quickly across the sky, their motors now throbbing steadily.
«Ours?» Anselmo asked.
«They seem so,» Robert Jordan said but knew that at that height you never could be sure. They could be an evening patrol of either side. But you always said pursuit planes were ours because it made people feel better. Bombers were another matter.
Anselmo evidently felt the same. «They are ours,» he said. «I recognize them. They are ‘Moscas’.»
«Good,» said Robert Jordan. «They seem to me to be ‘Moscas’, too.»
«They are ‘Moscas’,» Anselmo said.
Robert Jordan could have put the glasses on them and been sure instantly but he preferred not to. It made no difference to him who they were tonight and if it pleased the old man to have them be ours, he did not want to take them away. Now, as they moved out of sight toward Segovia, they did not look to be the green, red wing-tipped, low wing Russian conversion of the Boeing P32 that the Spaniards called ‘Moscas’. You could not see the colors but the cut was wrong. No. It was a Fascist Patrol coming home.
The sentry was still standing at the far box with his back turned.
«Let us go,» Robert Jordan said. He started up the hill, moving carefully and taking advantage of the cover until they were out of sight. Anselmo followed him at a hundred yards distance. When they were well out of sight of the bridge, he stopped and the old man came up and went into the lead and climbed steadily through the pass, up the steep slope in the dark.
«We have a formidable aviation,» the old man said happily.
«Yes.»
«And we will win.»
«We have to win.»
«Yes. And after we have won you must come to hunt.»
«To hunt what?»
«The boar, the bear, the wolf, the ibex—»
«You like to hunt?»
«Yes, man. More than anything. We all hunt in my village. You do not like to hunt?»
«No,» said Robert Jordan. «I do not like to kill animals.»
«With me it is the opposite,» the old man said. «I do not like to kill men.»
«Nobody does except those who are disturbed in the head,» Robert Jordan said. «But I feel nothing against it when it is necessary. When it is for the cause.»
«It is a different thing, though,» Anselmo said. «In my house, when I had a house, and now I have no house, there were the tusks of boar I had shot in the lower forest. There were the hides of wolves I had shot. In the winter, hunting them in the snow. One very big one, I killed at dusk in the outskirts of the village on my way home one night in November. There were four wolf hides on the floor of my house. They were worn by stepping on them but they were wolf hides. There were the horns of ibex that I had killed in the high Sierra, and there was an eagle stuffed by an embalmer of birds of Avila, with his wings spread, and eyes as yellow and real as the eyes of an eagle alive. It was a very beautiful thing and all of those things gave me great pleasure to contemplate.»
«Yes,» said Robert Jordan.
«On the door of the church of my village was nailed the paw of a bear that I killed in the spring, finding him on a hillside in the snow, overturning a log with this same paw.»
«When was this?»
«Six years ago. And every time I saw that paw, like the hand of a man, but with those long claws, dried and nailed through the palm to the door of the church, I received a pleasure.»
«Of pride?»
«Of pride of remembrance of the encounter with the bear on that hillside in the early spring. But of the killing of a man, who is a man as we are, there is nothing good that remains.»
«You can’t nail his paw to the church,» Robert Jordan said.
«No. Such a barbarity is unthinkable. Yet the hand of a man is like the paw of a bear.»
«So is the chest of a man like the chest of a bear,» Robert Jordan said. «With the hide removed from the bear, there are many similarities in the muscles.»
«Yes,» Anselmo said. «The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother of man.»
«So do the Indians in America,» Robert Jordan said. «And when they kill a bear they apologize to him and ask his pardon. They put his skull in a tree and they ask him to forgive them before they leave it.»
«The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother to man because he has the same body beneath his hide, because he drinks beer, because he enjoys music and because he likes to dance.»
«So also believe the Indians.»
«Are the Indians then gypsies?»
«No. But they believe alike about the bear.»
«Clearly. The gypsies also believe he is a brother because he steals for pleasure.»
«Have you gypsy blood?»
«No. But
