Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, The

He had been sweating heavily while he had been listening and now he was cold in the shade and the cool northeast wind. The sweater covered a leather shoulder holster, the leather ringed and salt-whitened with perspiration, that he wore with a forty-five-caliber Colt pistol which, by its constant pressure, had given him a boil a little below his armpit. He lay down on a canvas cot now close to the wall of the house. He was still listening.

The bird chirped and hopped about the cage and the young man looked up at it. Then he got up and unhooked the door of the cage and opened it. The bird cocked his head at the open door and drew it back, then jerked his head forward again, his bill pointing at an angle.

“Go on,” the young man said softly. “It’s not a trick.”

He put his hand into the cage and the bird flew against the back, fluttering against the withes.

“You’re silly,” the young man said. He took his hand out of the cage. “I’ll leave it open.”

He lay face down on the cot, his chin on his folded arms, and he was still listening. He heard the bird fly out of the cage and then he heard him sing in one of the laurel trees.

“It was foolish to keep the bird if the house is supposed to be empty,” he thought. “It is just such foolishness that makes all the trouble. How can I blame others when I am that stupid?”

In the vacant lot the boys were still playing baseball and it was quite cool now. The young man unbuckled the leather shoulder holster and laid the big pistol by his leg. Then he went to sleep.

When he woke it was dark and the street light on the comer shone through the leaves of the laurels. He stood up and walked to the front of the house and, keeping in the shadow and the shelter of the wall, looked up and down the street. A man in a narrow-brimmed, flat-topped straw hat stood under a tree on the comer. Enrique could not see the color of his coat or trousers, but he was a Negro.

Enrique went quickly to the back of the porch but there was no light there except that which shone on the weedy field from the back windows of the next two houses. There could be any number of people in the back. He knew that, since he could no longer really hear as he had in the afternoon, because a radio was going in the second house away.

Suddenly there came the mechanical crescendo of a siren and the young man felt a prickling wave go over his scalp. It came as suddenly as a person blushes, it felt like prickly heat, and it was gone as quickly as it came. The siren was on the radio; it was part of an advertisement, and the announcer’s voice followed, “Gavis tooth paste. Unaltering, insuperable, the best.”

Enrique smiled in the dark. It was time someone should be coming now.

After the siren on the recorded announcements came a crying baby which the announcer said would be satisfied with Malta-Malta, and then there was a motor horn and a customer who demanded green gas. “Don’t tell me any stories. I asked for green gas. More economical, more mileage. The best.”

Enrique knew all the advertisements by heart. They had not changed in the fifteen months that he had been away at war; they must still be using the same discs in the broadcasting station, and still the siren had deceived him and given him that thin, quick prickle across the scalp that was as definite a reaction to danger as a bird dog stiffening to the warm scent of quail.

He had not had that prickle when he started. Danger and the fear of it had once made him feel empty in his stomach. They had made him feel weak as you are weak with a fever, and he had known the inability to move; when you must force movement forward by legs that feel as dead as though they were asleep. That was all gone now, and he did without difficulty whatever he should do. The prickling was all that remained of the vast capacity for fear some brave men start with. It was his only remaining reaction to danger except for the perspiring which, he knew, he would always have, and now it served as a warning and nothing more.

As he stood, looking out at the tree where the man with the straw hat sat now, on the curb, a stone fell on the tiled floor of the porch. Enrique looked for it against the wall but did not find it. He passed his hands under the cot but it was not there. As he knelt, another pebble fell on the tiled floor, bounced and rolled into the corner toward the side of the house and into the street. Enrique picked it up. It was a smooth-feeling ordinary pebble and he put it in his pocket and went inside the house and down the stairs to the back door.

He stood to one side of the door and took the Colt out of the holster and held it, heavy in his right hand.

“The victory,” he said very quietly in Spanish, his mouth disdaining the word, and shifted softly on his bare feet to the other side of the door.

“To those who earn it,” someone said outside the door. It was a woman’s voice, giving the second half of the password, and it spoke quickly and unsteadily.