“You swallowed too much of that smoke,” he told himself. But he knew it was not that. He could feel, solidly, how unreal it all was through the absolute reality and he looked down at the bridge and then back to the sentry lying on the road, to where Anselmo lay, to Fernando against the bank and back up the smooth, brown road to the stalled truck and still it was unreal.
“You better sell out your part of you quickly,” he told himself. “You’re like one of those cocks in the pit where nobody has seen the wound given and it doesn’t show and he is already going cold with it.”
“Nuts,” he said to himself. “You are a little groggy is all, and you have a let-down after responsibility, is all. Take it easy.”
Then Agustín grabbed his arm and pointed and he looked across the gorge and saw Pablo.
They saw Pablo come running around the corner of the bend in the road. At the sheer rock where the road went out of sight they saw him stop and lean against the rock and fire back up the road. Robert Jordan saw Pablo, short, heavy and stocky, his cap gone, leaning against the rock wall and firing the short cavalry automatic rifle and he could see the bright flicker of the cascading brass hulls as the sun caught them. They saw Pablo crouch and fire another burst. Then, without looking back, he came running, short, bowlegged, fast, his head bent down straight toward the bridge.
Robert Jordan had pushed Agustín over and he had the stock of the big automatic rifle against his shoulder and was sighting on the bend of the road. His own submachine gun lay by his left hand. It was not accurate enough for that range.
As Pablo came toward them Robert Jordan sighted on the bend but nothing came. Pablo had reached the bridge, looked over his shoulder once, glanced at the bridge, and then turned to his left and gone down into the gorge and out of sight. Robert Jordan was still watching the bend and nothing had come in sight. Agustín got up on one knee. He could see Pablo climbing down into the gorge like a goat. There had been no noise of firing below since they had first seen Pablo.
“You see anything up above? On the rocks above?” Robert Jordan asked.
“Nothing.”
Robert Jordan watched the bend of the road. He knew the wall just below that was too steep for any one to climb but below it eased and some one might have circled up above.
If things had been unreal before, they were suddenly real enough now. It was as though a reflex lens camera had been suddenly brought into focus. It was then he saw the low-bodied, angled snout and squat green, gray and brown-splashed turret with the projecting machine gun come around the bend into the bright sun. He fired on it and he could hear the spang against the steel. The little whippet tank scuttled back behind the rock wall. Watching the corner, Robert Jordan saw the nose just reappear, then the edge of the turret showed and the turret swung so that the gun was pointing down the road.
“It seems like a mouse coming out of his hole,” Agustín said. “Look, Inglés.”
“He has little confidence,” Robert Jordan said.
“This is the big insect Pablo has been fighting,” Agustín said. “Hit him again, Inglés.”
“Nay. I cannot hurt him. I don’t want him to see where we are.”
The tank commenced to fire down the road. The bullets hit the road surface and sung off and now they were pinging and clanging in the iron of the bridge. It was the same machine gun they had heard below.
“Cabrón!” Agustín said. “Is that the famous tanks, Inglés?”
“That’s a baby one.”
“Cabrón. If I had a baby bottle full of gasoline I would climb up there and set fire to him. What will he do, Inglés?”
“After a while he will have another look.”
“And these are what men fear,” Agustín said. “Look, Inglés! He’s rekilling the sentries.”
“Since he has no other target,” Robert Jordan said. “Do not reproach him.”