I'll have to prove it doesn't work before I am out there.
The new sentry had gone inside the box and sat down.
His rifle with the bayonet fixed was leaning against the wall.
Robert Jordan took his glasses from his shirt pocket and turned the eyepieces until the end of the bridge showed sharp and gray-painted-metal clear.
Then he moved them onto the sentry box.
The sentry sat leaning against the wall.
His helmet hung on a peg and his face showed clearly.
Robert Jordan saw he was the same man who had been there on guard two days before in the afternoon watch.
He was wearing the same knitted stocking-cap.
And he had not shaved.
His cheeks were sunken and his cheekbones prominent.
He had bushy eyebrows that grew together in the center.
He looked sleepy and as Robert Jordan watched him he yawned.
Then he took out a tobacco pouch and a packet of papers and rolled himself a cigarette.
He tried to make a lighter work and finally put it in his pocket and went over to the brazier, leaned over, reached inside, brought up a piece of charcoal, juggled it in one hand while he blew on it, then lit the cigarette and tossed the lump of charcoal back into the brazier.
Robert Jordan, looking through the Zeiss 8-power glasses, watched his face as he leaned against the wall of the sentry box drawing on the cigarette.
Then he took the glasses down, folded them together and put them in his pocket.
I won't look at him again, he told himself.
He lay there and watched the road and tried not to think at all.
A squirrel chittered from a pine tree below him and Robert Jordan watched the squirrel come down the tree trunk, stopping on his way down to turn his head and look toward where the man was watching.
He saw the squirrel's eyes, small and bright, and watched his tail jerk in excitement.
Then the squirrel crossed to another tree, moving on the ground in long, small-pawed, tail-exaggerated bounds.
On the tree trunk he looked back at Robert Jordan, then pulled himself around the trunk and out of sight.
Then Robert Jordan heard the squirrel chitter from a high branch of the pine tree and he watched him there, spread flat along the branch, his tail jerking.
Robert Jordan looked down through the pines to the sentry box again.
He would like to have had the squirrel with him in his pocket.
He would like to have had anything that he could touch.
He rubbed his elbows against the pine needles but it was not the same.
Nobody knows how lonely you can be when you do this.
Me, though, I know.
I hope that Rabbit will get out of this all right.
Stop that now.
Yes, sure.
But I can hope that and I do.
That I blow it well and that she gets out all right.
Good.
Sure.
Just that.
That is all I want now.
He lay there now and looked away from the road and the sentry box and across to the far mountain.
Just do not think at all, he told himself.
He lay there quietly and watched the morning come.
It was a fine early summer morning and it came very fast now in the end of May.
Once a motorcyclist in a leather coat and all-leather helmet with an automatic rifle in a holster by his left leg came across the bridge and went on up the road. Once an ambulance crossed the bridge, passed below him, and went up the road.
But that was all.
He smelled the pines and he heard the stream and the bridge showed clear now and beautiful in the morning light.
He lay there behind the pine tree, with the submachine gun across his left forearm, and he never looked at the sentry box again until, long after it seemed that it was never coming, that nothing could happen on such a lovely late May morning, he heard the sudden, clustered, thudding of the bombs.
As he heard the bombs, the first thumping noise of them, before the echo of them came back in thunder from the mountain, Robert Jordan drew in a long breath and lifted the submachine gun from where it lay.
His arm felt stiff from its weight and his fingers were heavy with reluctance.
The man in the sentry box stood up when he heard the bombs.