“To quiet down the bulls and keep them from breaking horns against the stone walls, or goring each other.”
“Must be swell being a steer.”
We went down the stairs and out of the door and walked across the square toward the Café Iruña. There were two lonely looking ticket-houses standing in the square. Their windows, marked Sol , Sol y Sombra , and Sombra , were shut. They would not open until the day before the fiesta.
Across the square the white wicker tables and chairs of the Iruña extended out beyond the Arcade to the edge of the street. I looked for Brett and Mike at the tables. There they were. Brett and Mike and Robert Cohn. Brett was wearing a Basque beret. So was Mike. Robert Cohn was bareheaded and wearing his spectacles. Brett saw us coming and waved. Her eyes crinkled up as we came up to the table.
“Hello, you chaps!” she called.
Brett was happy. Mike had a way of getting an intensity of feeling into shaking hands. Robert Cohn shook hands because we were back.
“Where the hell have you been?” I asked.
“I brought them up here,” Cohn said.
“What rot,” Brett said. “We’d have gotten here earlier if you hadn’t come.”
“You’d never have gotten here.”
“What rot! You chaps are brown. Look at Bill.”
“Did you get good fishing?” Mike asked. “We wanted to join you.”
“It wasn’t bad. We missed you.”