'Throwing up will never help him, now.'
"'In my life,' another peasant said, 'in my life I've never seen a thing like Don Faustino.'
"'There are others,' another peasant said.
'Have patience.
Who knows what we may yet see?'
"'There may be giants and dwarfs,' the first peasant said. 'There may be Negroes and rare beasts from Africa. But for me never, never will there be anything like Don Faustino.
But let's have another one!
Come on. Let's have another one!'
"The drunkards were handing around bottles of anis and cognac that they had looted from the bar of the club of the fascists, drinking them down like wine, and many of the men in the lines were beginning to be a little drunk, too, from drinking after the strong emotion of Don Benito, Don Federico, Don Ricardo and especially Don Faustino.
Those who did not drink from the bottles of liquor were drinking from leather wineskins that were passed about and one handed a wineskin to me and I took a long drink, letting the wine run cool down my throat from the leather _bota_ for I was very thirsty, too.
"'To kill gives much thirst,' the man with the wineskin said to me.
"'_Que va_,' I said.
'Hast thou killed?'
"'We have killed four,' he said, proudly.
'Not counting the _civiles_.
Is it true that thee killed one of the _civiles_, Pilar?'
"'Not one,' I said.
'I shot into the smoke when the wall fell, as did the others.
That is all.'
"'Where got thee the pistol, Pilar?'
"'From Pablo.
Pablo gave it to me after he killed the _civiles_.'
"'Killed he them with this pistol?'
"'With no other,' I said.
'And then he armed me with it.'
"'Can I see it, Pilar?
Can I hold it?'
"'Why not, man?' I said, and I took it out from under the rope and handed it to him.
But I was wondering why no one else had come out and just then who should come out but Don Guillermo Martin from whose store the flails, the herdsman's clubs, and the wooden pitchforks had been taken.
Don Guillermo was a fascist but otherwise there Was nothing against him.
"It is true he paid little to those who made the flails but he charged little for them too and if one did not wish to buy flails from Don Guillermo, it was possible to make them for nothing more than the cost of the wood and the leather.
He had a rude way of speaking and he was undoubtedly a fascist and a member of their club and he sat at noon and at evening in the cane chairs of their club to read _El Debate_, to have his shoes shined, and to drink vermouth and seltzer and eat roasted almonds, dried shrimps, and anchovies.
But one does not kill for that, and I am sure if it had not been for the insults of Don Ricardo Montalvo and the lamentable spectacle of Don Faustino, and the drinking consequent on the emotion of them and the others, some one would have shouted,
'That Don Guillermo should go in peace.
We have his flails.
Let him go.'
"Because the people of this town are as kind as they can be cruel and they have a natural sense of justice and a desire to do that which is right.
But cruelty had entered into the lines and also drunkenness or the beginning of drunkenness and the lines were not as they were when Don Benito had come out.
I do not know how it is in other countries, and no one cares more for the pleasure of drinking than I do, but in Spain drunkenness, when produced by other elements than wine, is a thing of great ugliness and the people do things that they would not have done.
Is it not so in your country, _Ingles?_"
"It is so," Robert Jordan said.
"When I was seven years old and going with my mother to attend a wedding in the state of Ohio at which I was to be the boy of a pair of boy and girl who carried flowers--"
"Did you do that?" asked Maria.
"How nice!"
"In this town a Negro was hanged to a lamp post and later burned.
It was an arc light. A light which lowered from the post to the pavement.
And he was hoisted, first by the mechanism which was used to hoist the arc light but this broke--"
"A Negro," Maria said.
"How barbarous!"
"Were the people drunk?" asked Pilar.