The passage opened to a large patio with low cells on all sides. The cells were open, the prisoners and Cordano’s soldiers moving freely together. Captain Ramon informed him that for a time in the cool of the day like this the cells were unlocked, but the prisoners were returned to their quarters at nine promptly. Small fires were here and there; perhaps fifteen men in all, lounging about the fires, the guards mixed freely among them, ponies feeding in far corners. Some of the men gambled. All smoked; one sang with guitar. No sign of a face that might be an American. At least, not for Elbert’s first fierce look. He noted the inner blank wall of the barracks, but dusk covered what stains might have been on the ground. To-morrow, the next day--six more of these men to die--and they played cards to-night. Tobacco was as good to them as ever; peace was abroad ... one boyish voice sang, but Elbert remembered the underground smell of the long clay arch. No American save himself in the prison court--no troubled thoughts save his own apparently. He moved from knot to knot among the fires, Ramon Bistula having excused himself to enter the office. The faces turned up to him from the cards, from the interminable little match boxes and papers of tobacco. The one with his guitar looked up with a gray thin smile as he hummed, but did not lose a beat of his song.... Scarred, pocked, peaceful faces--they did not seem to know any more of what was coming than the ponies in the farther shadow. There was one with the luminous welt of a knife-wound, running down the side of his throat and vanishing like the head of a worm under his collar ... boys and men. All smoked, and one sang with guitar. 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.