"That's the wormwood," Robert Jordan told him.
"In this, the real absinthe, there is wormwood.
It's supposed to rot your brain out but I don't believe it.
It only changes the ideas.
You should pour water into it very slowly, a few drops at a time.
But I poured it into the water."
"What are you saying?" Pablo said angrily, feeling the mockery.
"Explaining the medicine," Robert Jordan told him and grinned.
"I bought it in Madrid.
It was the last bottle and it's lasted me three weeks."
He took a big swallow of it and felt it coasting over his tongue in delicate anxsthesia.
He looked at Pablo and grinned again.
"How's business?" he asked.
Pablo did not answer and Robert Jordan looked carefully at the other three men at the table.
One had a large flat face, flat and brown as a Serrano ham with a nose flattened and broken, and the long thin Russian cigarette, projecting at an angle, made the face look even flatter.
This man had short gray hair and a gray stubble of beard and wore the usual black smock buttoned at the neck.
He looked down at the table when Robert Jordan looked at him but his eyes were steady and they did not blink.
The other two were evidently brothers.
They looked much alike and were both short, heavily built, dark haired, their hair growing low on their foreheads, dark-eyed and brown.
One had a scar across his forehead above his left eye and as he looked at them, they looked back at him steadily.
One looked to be about twenty-six or -eight, the other perhaps two years older.
"What are you looking at?" one brother, the one with the scar, asked.
"Thee," Robert Jordan said.
"Do you see anything rare?"
"No," said Robert Jordan.
"Have a cigarette?"
"Why not?" the brother said.
He had not taken any before.
"These are like the other had. He of the train."
"Were you at the train?"
"We were all at the train," the brother said quietly.
"All except the old man."
"That is what we should do now," Pablo said.
"Another train."
"We can do that," Robert Jordan said.
"After the bridge."
He could see that the wife of Pablo had turned now from the fire and was listening.
When he said the word "bridge" every one was quiet.
"After the bridge," he said again deliberately and took a sip of the absinthe.
I might as well bring it on, he thought.
It's coming anyWay.
"I do not go for the bridge," Pablo said, looking down at the table.
"Neither me nor my people."
Robert Jordan said nothing.
He looked at Anselmo and raised the cup.
"Then we shall do it alone, old one," he said and smiled.
"Without this coward," Anselmo said.
"What did you say?" Pablo spoke to the old man.
"Nothing for thee.
I did not speak to thee," Anselmo told him.