"The _Ingles_ and I understand one another."
"Nobody understands thee.
Neither God nor thy mother," Pilar said.
"Nor I either.
Get along, _Ingles_. Make thy good-bys with thy cropped head and go. _Me cago en tu padre_, but I begin to think thou art afraid to see the bull come out."
"Thy mother," Robert Jordan said.
"Thou never hadst one," Pilar whispered cheerfully.
"Now go, because I have a great desire to start this and get it over with.
Go with thy people," she said to Pablo.
"Who knows how long their stern resolution is good for?
Thou hast a couple that I would not trade thee for.
Take them and go."
Robert Jordan slung his pack on his back and walked over to the horses to find Maria.
"Good-by, _guapa_," he said.
"I will see thee soon."
He had an unreal feeling about all of this now as though he had said it all before or as though it were a train that were going, especially as though it were a train and he was standing on the platform of a railway station.
"Good-by, Roberto," she said.
"Take much care."
"Of course," he said.
He bent his head to kiss her and his pack rolled forward against the back of his head so that his forehead bumped hers hard.
As this happened he knew this had happened before too.
"Don't cry," he said, awkward not only from the load.
"I do not," she said.
"But come back quickly."
"Do not worry when you hear the firing.
There is bound to be much firing."
"Nay.
Only come back quickly."
"Good-by, _guapa_," he said awkwardly.
"_Salud_, Roberto."
Robert Jordan had not felt this young since he had taken the train at Red Lodge to go down to Billings to get the train there to go away to school for the first time.
He had been afraid to go and he did not want any one to know it and, at the station, just before the conductor picked up the box he would step up on to reach the steps of the day coach, his father had kissed him good-by and said,
"May the Lord watch between thee and me while we are absent the one from the other."
His father had been a very religious man and he had said it simply and sincerely.
But his moustache had been moist and his eyes were damp with emotion and Robert Jordan had been so embarrassed by all of it, the damp religious sound of the prayer, and by his father kissing him good-by, that he had felt suddenly so much older than his father and sorry for him that he could hardly bear it.
After the train started he had stood on the rear platform and watched the station and the water tower grow smaller and smaller and the rails crossed by the ties narrowed toward a point where the station and the water tower stood now minute and tiny in the steady clicking that was taking him away.
The brakeman said,
"Dad seemed to take your going sort of hard, Bob."
"Yes," he had said watching the sagebrush that ran from the edge of the road bed between the passing telegraph poles across to the streaming-by dusty stretching of the road.
He was looking for sage hens.
"You don't mind going away to school?"
"No," he had said and it was true.
It would not have been true before but it was true that minute and it was only now, at this parting, that he ever felt as young again as he had felt before that train left.
He felt very young now and very awkward and he was saying good-by as awkwardly as one can be when saying good-by to a young girl when you are a boy in school, saying good-by at the front porch, not knowing whether to kiss the girl or not.
Then he knew it was not the good-by he was being awkward about.
It was the meeting he was going to.
The good-by was only a part of the awkwardness he felt about the meeting.
You're getting them again, he told himself.
But I suppose there is no one that does not feel that he is too young to do it.
He would not put a name to it.