Either you will have to blow that bridge in the morning or you will not have to.
But do not start deceiving yourself into thinking you won't have to blow it.
You will blow it one day or you will blow it another.
Or if it is not this bridge it will be some other bridge.
It is not you who decides what shall be done.
You follow orders.
Follow them and do not try to think beyond them.
The orders on this are very clear.
Too very clear.
But you must not worry nor must you be frightened.
For if you allow yourself the luxury of normal fear that fear will infect those who must work with you.
But that heads business was quite a thing all the same, he told himself.
And the old man running onto them on the hilltop alone.
How would you have liked to run onto them like that?
That impressed you, didn't it?
Yes, that impressed you, Jordan.
You have been quite impressed more than once today.
But you have behaved O.K.
So far you have behaved all right.
You do very well for an instructor in Spanish at the University of Montana, he joked at himself.
You do all right for that.
But do not start to thinking that you are anything very special.
You haven't gotten very far in this business.
Just remember Duran, who never had any military training and who was a composer and lad about town before the movement and is now a damned good general commanding a brigade.
It was all as simple and easy to learn and understand to Duran as chess to a child chess prodigy.
You had read on and studied the art of war ever since you were a boy and your grandfather had started you on the American Civil War.
Except that Grandfather always called it the War of the Rebellion.
But compared with Duran you were like a good sound chess player against a boy prodigy.
Old Duran.
It would be good to see Duran again.
He would see him at Gaylord's after this was over.
Yes.
After this was over.
See how well he was behaving?
I'll see him at Gaylord's, he said to himself again, after this is over.
Don't kid yourself, he said.
You do it all perfectly O.K.
Cold.
Without kidding yourself.
You aren't going to see Duran any more and it is of no importance.
Don't be that way either, he told himself.
Don't go in for any of those luxuries.
Nor for heroic resignation either.
We do not want any citizens full of heroic resignation in these hills.
Your grandfather fought four years in our Civil War and you are just finishing your first year in this war.
You have a long time to go yet and you are very well fitted for the work.
And now you have Maria, too.
Why, you've got everything.
You shouldn't worry.
What is a little brush between a guerilla band and a squadron of cavalry?