For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway Page A

good.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œOurs?” Anselmo asked.
    â€œThey 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 .”
    â€œGood,” said Robert Jordan. “They seem to me to be Moscas, too.”
    â€œThey 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 Spaniardscalled 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.
    â€œLet 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.
    â€œWe have a formidable aviation,” the old man said happily.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd we will win.”
    â€œWe have to win.”
    â€œYes. And after we have won you must come to hunt.”
    â€œTo hunt what?”
    â€œThe boar, the bear, the wolf, the ibex——”
    â€œYou like to hunt?”
    â€œYes, man. More than anything. We all hunt in my village. You do not like to hunt?”
    â€œNo,” said Robert Jordan. “I do not like to kill animals.”
    â€œWith me it is the opposite,” the old man said. “I do not like to kill men.”
    â€œNobody 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.”
    â€œIt 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.”
    â€œYes,” said Robert Jordan.
    â€œOn 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.”
    â€œWhen was this?”
    â€œSix years