Ramon Bistula approached, but only to excuse himself again. Round and round among the little fires, Elbert moved. No, he was not as they were. It was as if in passing the clay tunnel to the little court, something had fallen from them—ghastly responsibility of self-preservation—the very thing that choked his throat now.
He had paused a second time, before the feet of the boyish figure with the guitar. The words of the song were of some curious provincial Spanish, and slowly uttered. It was this that the youth sang:
A girl once stood in a doorway and there was dust of corn upon her elbow, upon her cheek, and pale gold corn in a pile upon the mortar-stone at her side ... a girl with corn like sun-dust, shining on her skin ... with a golden bud springing like young corn in her breast.
Something like that, chaste as the light of that endless summertime. And the youth strumming the guitar seemed not to feel the great wounding of separation—but to take a vague sweetness from repeating the words—as of approach to that far doorway.
Elbert could stand the tension no longer. Through his mind flicked memories of the supper in the old barefooted woman’s house in Nacimiento, of the ride afterward, of the strange, still, flowered room in Tucson. He longed to be alone, his thoughts turned yearningly toward the fonda of Arecibo; he longed to stand alone with Mamie in the clean corral behind it. A sentry, one of the soldiers of Cordano stopped him, as he started to enter the portal from the patio.
‘I am leaving,’ he said. ‘I am with the captain of the rurales—’
Ramon Bistula now came forward from the low side door in the wall, and at the same instant, the heavy wooden gate opened from the street, and Mamie veered in under the arch, led by a soldier. Another soldier followed, bearing the big stock-saddle and blankets—Mamie entering this portal of clay! He called her name; she nickered back. Now Captain Ramon was saying:
‘I trust it will not be of great inconvenience—your things being brought from the fonda for this one night—you to pass this one night here, instead of at the fonda—more air, more room—a room being prepared, in fact, for yourself quite alone.’
XIX
A CORNER OF THE WALL
A room of his own. It was a cell with wooden bars, looking out upon the court where the prisoners and soldiers still played and lounged. A huge moon, almost full, came up over the opposite roof of low cells, and in the distant shadow there, Mamie squealed and let fly—a plebeian pony venturing too close, no doubt.