olonel came into the room in his pajamas he drew himself stiff and saluted.
The Lieutenant-Colonel Miranda, who was a short, gray-faced man, who had been in the army all his life, who had lost the love of his wife in Madrid while he was losing his digestion in Morocco, and become a Republican when he found he could not divorce his wife (there was never any question of recovering his digestion), had entered the civil war as a Lieutenant-Colonel. He had only one ambition, to finish the war with the same rank. He had defended the Sierra well and he wanted to be left alone there to defend it whenever it was attacked. He felt much healthier in the war, probably due to the forced curtailment of the number of meat courses, he had an enormous stock of sodium-bicarbonate, he had his whiskey in the evening, his twenty-three-year-old mistress was having a baby, as were nearly all the other girls who had started out as _milicianas_ in the July of the year before, and now he came into the room, nodded in answer to Gomez''s salute and put out his hand.
"What brings thee, Gomez" he asked and then, to the officer at the desk who was his chief of operation, "Give me a cigarette, please, Pepe."
Gomez showed him Andr閟''s papers and the dispatch. The Lieutenant-Colonel looked at the _Salvoconducto_ quickly, looked at Andr閟, nodded and smiled, and then looked at the dispatch hungrily. He felt of the seal, tested it with his forefinger, then handed both the safe-conduct and dispatch back to Andr閟.