Who goes?"
They heard a rifle bolt snick as it was drawn back and then the knock against the wood as it was pushed forward and down on the stock.
"Comrades," Anselmo said.
"What comrades?"
"Comrades of Pablo," the old man told him.
"Dost thou not know us?"
"Yes," the voice said.
"But it is an order.
Have you the password?"
"No.
We come from below."
"I know," the man said in the dark.
"You come from the bridge.
I know all of that.
The order is not mine.
You must know the second half of a password."
"What is the first half then?" Robert Jordan said.
"I have forgotten it," the man said in the dark and laughed.
"Go then unprintably to the campfire with thy obscene dynamite."
"That is called guerilla discipline," Anselmo said.
"Uncock thy piece."
"It is uncocked," the man said in the dark.
"I let it down with my thumb and forefinger."
"Thou wilt do that with a Mauser sometime which has no knurl on the bolt and it will fire."
"This is a Mauser," the man said.
"But I have a grip of thumb and forefinger beyond description.
Always I let it down that way."
"Where is the rifle pointed?" asked Anselmo into the dark.
"At thee," the man said, "all the time that I descended the bolt.
And when thou comest to the camp, order that some one should relieve me because I have indescribable and unprintable hunger and I have forgotten the password."
"How art thou called?" Robert Jordan asked.
"Agustin," the man said.
"I am called Agustin and I am dying with boredom in this spot."
"We will take the message," Robert Jordan said and he thought how the word _aburmiento_ which means boredom in Spanish was a word no peasant would use in any other language.
Yet it is one of the most common words in the mouth of a Spaniard of any class.
"Listen to me," Agustin said, and coming close he put his hand on Robert Jordan's shoulder.
Then striking a flint and steel together he held it up and blowing on the end of the cork, looked at the young man's face in its glow.
"You look like the other one," he said.
"But something different.
Listen," he put the lighter down and stood holding his rifle.
"Tell me this. Is it true about the bridge?"
"What about the bridge?"
"That we blow up an obscene bridge and then have to obscenely well obscenity ourselves off out of these mountains?"
"I know not."
"_You_ know not," Agustin said.
"What a barbarity!
Whose then is the dynamite?"
"Mine."
"And knowest thou not what it is for?
Don't tell me tales."