Robert Jordan had gone back to look for the tank which Montero said he thought might have stopped behind the apartment building on the corner of the tram-line.
It was there all right.
But it was not a tank.
Spaniards called anything a tank in those days.
It was an old armored car.
The driver did not want to leave the angle of the apartment house and bring it up to the bull ring.
He was standing behind it with his arms folded against the metal of the car and his head in the leather-padded helmet on his arms.
He shook his head when Robert Jordan spoke to him and kept it pressed against his arms.
Then he turned his head without looking at Robert Jordan.
"I have no orders to go there," he said sullenly.
Robert Jordan had taken his pistol out of the holster and pushed the muzzle of the pistol against the leather coat of the armored car driver.
"Here are your orders," he had told him.
The man shook his head with the big padded-leather helmet like a football player's on it and said,
"There is no ammunition for the machine gun."
"We have ammunition at the bull ring," Robert Jordan had told him.
"Come on, let's go.
We will fill the belts there.
Come on."
"There is no one to work the gun," the driver said.
"Where is he?
Where is your mate?"
"Dead," the driver had said.
"Inside there."
"Get him out," Robert Jordan had said.
"Get him out of there."
"I do not like to touch him," the driver had said.
"And he is bent over between the gun and the wheel and I cannot get past him."
"Come on," Robert Jordan had said.
"We will get him out together."
He had banged his head as he climbed into the armored car and it had made a small cut over his eyebrow that bled down onto his face.
The dead man was heavy and so stiff you could not bend him and he had to hammer at his head to get it out from where it had wedged, face down, between his seat and the wheel.
Finally he got it up by pushing with his knee up under the dead man's head and then, pulling back on the man's waist now that the head was loose, he pulled the dead man out himself toward the door.
"Give me a hand with him," he had said to the driver.
"I do not want to touch him," the driver had said and Robert Jordan had seen that he was crying.
The tears ran straight down on each side of his nose on the powder-grimed slope of his face and his nose was running, too.
Standing beside the door he had swung the dead man out and the dead man fell onto the sidewalk beside the tram-line still in that hunched-over, doubled-up position.
He lay there, his face waxy gray against the cement sidewalk, his hands bent under him as they had been in the car.
"Get in, God damn it," Robert Jordan had said, motioning now with his pistol to the driver.
"Get in there now."
Just then he had seen this man who had come out from the lee of the apartment house building.
He had on a long overcoat and he was bareheaded and his hair was gray, his cheekbones broad and his eyes were deep and set close together.
He had a package of Chesterfields in his hand and he took one out and handed it toward Robert Jordan who was pushing the driver into the armored car with his pistol.
"Just a minute, Comrade," he had said to Robert Jordan in Spanish.
"Can you explain to me something about the fighting?"
Robert Jordan took the cigarette and put it in the breast pocket of his blue mechanic jumper.
He had recognized this comrade from his pictures.
It was the British economist.
"Go muck yourself," he said in English and then, in Spanish, to the armored car driver. "Down there.
The bull ring.
See?"