So was the screw-top tin with the fuse and the caps.
Robert Jordan felt in the other sack.
It was still full of explosive.
There might be one packet missing.
He stood up and turned to the woman.
There is a hollow empty feeling that a man can have when he is waked too early in the morning that is almost like the feeling of disaster and he had this multiplied a thousand times.
"And this is what you call guarding one's materials," he said.
"I slept with my head against them and one arm touching them," Pilar told him.
"You slept well."
"Listen," the woman said.
"He got up in the night and I said,
'Where do you go, Pablo?'
'To urinate, woman,' he told me and I slept again.
When I woke again I did not know what time had passed but I thought, when he was not there, that he had gone down to look at the horses as was his custom.
Then," she finished miserably, "when he did not come I worried and when I worried I felt of the sacks to be sure all was well and there were the slit places and I came to thee."
"Come on," Robert Jordan said.
They were outside now and it was still so near the middle of the night that you could not feel the morning coming.
"Can he get out with the horses other ways than by the sentry?"
"Two ways."
"Who's at the top?"
"Eladio."
Robert Jordan said nothing more until they reached the meadow where the horses were staked out to feed.
There were three horses feeding in the meadow.
The big bay and the gray were gone.
"How long ago do you think it was he left you?"
"It must have been an hour."
"Then that is that," Robert Jordan said.
"I go to get what is left of my sacks and go back to bed."
"I will guard them."
"_Que va_, you will guard them.
You've guarded them once already."
"_Ingles_," the woman said,
"I feel in regard to this as you do.
There is nothing I would not do to bring back thy property.
You have no need to hurt me.
We have both been betrayed by Pablo."
As she said this Robert Jordan realized that he could not afford the luxury of being bitter, that he could not quarrel with this woman.
He had to work with this woman on that day that was already two hours and more gone.
He put his hand on her shoulder.
"It is nothing, Pilar," he told her.
"What is gone is of small importance.
We shall improvise something that will do as well."
"But what did he take?"
"Nothing, woman.
Some luxuries that one permits oneself."
"Was it part of thy mechanism for the exploding?"
"Yes.
But there are other ways to do the exploding.
Tell me, did Pablo not have caps and fuse?
Surely they would have equipped him with those?"