For Whom The Bell Tolls

"In this of today we will be together, will we not?"

"After the start, yes."

"Not at the start?"

"No. Thou wilt be with the horses."

"I cannot be with thee?"

"No. I have work that only I can do and I would worry about thee."

"But you will come fast when it is done?"

"Very fast," he said and grinned in the dark. "Come, guapa, let us go and eat."

"And thy robe?"

"Roll it up, if it pleases thee."

"It pleases me," she said.

"I will help thee."

"Nay. Let me do it alone."

She knelt to spread and roll the robe, then changed her mind and stood up and shook it so it flapped. Then she knelt down again to straighten it and roll it. Robert Jordan picked up the two packs, holding them carefully so that nothing would spill from the slits in them, and walked over through the pines to the cave mouth where the smoky blanket hung. It was ten minutes to three by his watch when he pushed the blanket aside with his elbow and went into the cave.

38

They were in the cave and the men were standing before the fire Maria was fanning. Pilar had coffee ready in a pot. She had not gone back to bed at all since she had roused Robert Jordan and now she was sitting on a stool in the smoky cave sewing the rip in one of Jordan's packs. The other pack was already sewed. The firelight lit up her face.

"Take more of the stew," she said to Fernando. "What does it matter if thy belly should be full? There is no doctor to operate if you take a goring."

"Don't speak that way, woman," Agustin said. "Thou hast the tongue of the great whore."

He was leaning on the automatic rifle, its legs folded close against the fretted barrel, his pockets were full of grenades, a sack of pans hung from one shoulder, and a full bandolier of ammunition hung over the other shoulder. He was smoking a cigarette and he held a bowl of coffee in one hand and blew smoke onto its surface as he raised it to his lips.

"Thou art a walking hardware store," Pilar said to him. "Thou canst not walk a hundred yards with all that."

"Que va, woman," Agustin said. "It is all downhill."

"There is a climb to the post," Fernando said. "Before the downward slope commences."

"I will climb it like a goat," Agustin said.

"And thy brother?" he asked Eladio. "Thy famous brother has mucked off?"

Eladio was standing against the wall.

"Shut up," he said.

He was nervous and he knew they all knew it. He was always nervous and irritable before action. He moved from the wall to the table and began filling his pockets with grenades from one of the rawhide-covered panniers that leaned, open, against the table leg.

Robert Jordan squatted by the pannier beside him. He reached into the pannier and picked out four grenades. Three were the oval Mill bomb type, serrated, heavy iron with a spring level held down in position by a cotter pin with pulling rig attached.

"Where did these come from?" he asked Eladio.

"Those? Those are from the Republic. The old man brought them."

"How are they?"

"Valen mas que pesan," Eladio said. "They are worth a fortune apiece."

"I brought those," Anselmo said. "Sixty in one pack. Ninety pounds, Ingles."

"Have you used those?" Robert Jordan asked Pilar.

"Que va have we used them?" the woman said. "It was with those Pablo slew the post at Otero."

When she mentioned Pablo, Agustin started cursing. Robert Jordan saw the look on Pilar's face in the firelight.

"Leave it," she said to Agustin sharply. "It does no good to talk."

"Have they always exploded?" Robert Jordan held the graypainted grenade in his hand, trying the bend of the cotter pin with his thumbnail.

"Always," Eladio said. "There was not a dud in any of that lot we used."

"And how quickly?"

"In the distance one can throw it. Quickly. Quickly enough."

"And these?"

He held up a soup-tin-shaped bomb, with a tape wrapping around a wire loop.

"They are a garbage," Eladio told him. "They blow. Yes. But it is all flash and no fragments."

"But do they always blow?"

"Que va, always," Pilar said. "There is no always either with our munitions or theirs."

"But you said the other always blew."

"Not me," Pilar told him. "You asked another, not me. I have seen no always in any of that stuff."

"They all blew," Eladio insisted. "Speak the truth, woman."

"How do you know they all blew?" Pilar asked him. "It was Pablo who threw them. You killed no one at Otero."

"That son of the great whore," Agustin began.

"Leave it alone," Pilar said sharply. Then she went on. "They are all much the same, Ingles. But the corrugated ones are more simple."

I'd better use one of each on each set, Robert Jordan thought. But the serrated type will lash easier and more securely.

"Are you going to be throwing bombs, Ingles?" Agustin asked.

"Why not?" Robert Jordan said.