So thinking, he took his packages and started across to the gully which led into the arroyo that let him into his place by the back way.  He meant to return as he had come; and if any one happened to be spying, he would think Starr had chosen that route as a short cut to town, which it was.

A block away from the little side street that opened to the gully, Starr stopped short, shocked into a keener attention to his surroundings.  He had just stepped over an automobile track on the walk, where a machine had crossed it to enter a gateway which was now closed.  And the track had been made by a cord tire.  He looked up at the gate of unpainted planks, heavy-hinged and set into a high adobe wall such as one sees so often in New Mexico.  The gate was locked, as he speedily discovered; locked on the inside, he guessed, with bars or great hooks or something.

He went on to the building that seemed to belong to the place; a long two-story adobe building with the conventional two-story gallery running along the entire front, and with the deep-set, barred windows that are also typically Mexican.  Every town in the adobe section of the southwest has a dozen or so buildings almost exactly like this one.  The door was blue-painted, with the paint scaling off.  Over it was a plain lettered sign:  LAS NUEVAS.

Starr had seen copies of that paper at the Mexican ranches he visited, and as far as he knew, it was an ordinary newspaper of the country-town style, printed in Mexican for the benefit of a large percentage of Mexican-Americans whose knowledge of English print is extremely hazy.

He walked on slowly to the corner, puzzling over this new twist in the faint clue he followed.  It had not occurred to him that so innocuous a sheet as Las Nuevas should be implicated, and yet, why not?  He turned at the corner and went back to the nearest newstand, where he bought an El Paso paper for a blind and laid it down on a pile of Las Nuevas while he lighted his cigarette.  He talked with the little, pock-marked Mexican who kept the shop, and when the fellow’s back was turned toward him for a minute, he stole a copy of Las Nuevas off the pile and strolled out of the shop with it wrapped in his El Paso paper.

He stole it because he knew that not many Americans ever bought the paper, and he feared that the hombre in charge might wonder why an American should pay a nickel for a copy of Las Nuevas.  As it happened, the hombre in charge was looking into a mirror cunningly placed for the guarding of stock from pilferers, and he saw Starr steal the paper.  Also he saw Starr slip a dime under a stack of magazines where it would be found later on.  So he wondered a great deal more than he would have done if Starr had bought the paper, but Starr did not know that.

Starr went back to his cabin by way of the arroyo and the hole in the manger.  When he unlocked the door and went in, he had an odd feeling that some one had been there in his absence.  He stood still just inside the door and inspected everything, trying to remember just where his clothes had been scattered, where he had left his hat, just how his blankets had been flung back on the bed when he jumped up to see what had startled Rabbit; every detail, in fact, that helps to make up the general look of a room left in disorder.