"There is too much of this silly guerilla nonsense going on.
All of you should come in and submit to our Libertarian discipline.
Then when we wished to send out guerillas we would send them out as they are needed."
Andres was a man endowed with almost supreme patience.
He had taken the coming in through the wire calmly.
None of this examination had flustered him.
He found it perfectly normal that this man should have no understanding of them nor of what they were doing and that he should talk idiocy was to be expected.
That it should all go slowly should be expected too; but now he wished to go.
"Listen, _Compadre_," he said.
"It is very possible that you are right.
But I have orders to deliver that dispatch to the General commanding the Thirty-Fifth Division, which makes an attack at daylight in these hills and it is already late at night and I must go."
"What attack?
What do you know of an attack?"
"Nay. I know nothing.
But I must go now to Navacerrada and go on from there.
Wilt thou send me to thy commander who will give me transport to go on from there?
Send one with me now to respond to him that there be no delay."
"I distrust all of this greatly," he said.
"It might have been better to have shot thee as thou approached the wire."
"You have seen my papers, Comrade, and I have explained my mission," Andres told him patiently.
"Papers can be forged," the officer said.
"Any fascist could invent such a mission.
I will go with thee myself to the Commander."
"Good," Andres said.
"That you should come.
But that we should go quickly."
"Thou, Sanchez.
Thou commandest in my place," the officer said.
"Thou knowest thy duties as well as I do.
I take this so-called Comrade to the Commander."
They started down the shallow trench behind the crest of the hill and in the dark Andres smelt the foulness the defenders of the hill crest had made all through the bracken on that slope.
He did not like these people who were like dangerous children; dirty, foul, undisciplined, kind, loving, silly and ignorant but always dangerous because they were armed.
He, Andres, was without politics except that he was for the Republic.
He had heard these people talk many times and he thought what they said was often beautiful and fine to hear but he did not like them.
It is not liberty not to bury the mess one makes, he thought.
No animal has more liberty than the cat; but it buries the mess it makes.
The cat is the best anarchist.
Until they learn that from the cat I cannot respect them.
Ahead of him the officer stopped suddenly.
"You have your _carabine_ still," he said.
"Yes," Andres said.
"Why not?"
"Give it to me," the officer said.
"You could shoot me in the back with it."
"Why?" Andres asked him.
"Why would I shoot thee in the back?"
"One never knows," the officer said.
"I trust no one.
Give me the carbine."
Andres unslung it and handed it to him.