hings that they would not have done. Is it not so in your country, _Ingl閟_"
"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. "Were they drunk thus to burn a Negro"
"I do not know," Robert Jordan said. "Because I saw it only looking out from under the blinds of a window in the house which stood on the corner where the arc light was. The street was full of people and when they lifted the Negro up for the second time--"
"If you had only seven years and were in a house, you could not tell if they were drunk or not," Pilar said.
"As I said, when they lifted the Negro up for the second time, my mother pulled me away from the window, so I saw no more," Robert Jordan said. "But since I have had experiences which demonstrate that drunkenness is the same in my country. It is ugly and brutal."
"You were too young at seven," Maria said. "You were too young for such things. I have never seen a Negro except in a circus. Unless the Moors are Negroes."