“Well,” Starr summed up the significance of the discovery, “the game’s open; now we’ll get action.”

He glanced down to make sure that he had not left any tracks on the floor and was glad he had not worn his boots.  Then he snapped off the light, went out, and left the door swinging and banging as it had been before.  If he learned no more, at least he was paid for the trip.

He went straight to the rear door of the building, taking no pains to conceal his footsteps.  The wind, he knew, would brush them out completely with the sand and dust it sent swirling around the yard with every gust.  As he had hoped, the door was not bolted but locked with a key, so he let himself in with one of the pass keys he carried for just such work as this.  He felt at the windows and saw that the blinds were down, and turned on his light.

The place had all the greasy dinginess of the ordinary print shop.  The presses were here, and the motor that operated them.  Being a bi-weekly and not having much job printing to do, it was evident that Las Nuevas did not work overtime.  Things were cleaned up for the night and ready for the next day’s work.  It all looked very commonplace and as innocent as the paper it produced.

Starr went on slowly, examining the forms, the imperfect first proofs of circulars and placards that had been placed on hook files.  AVISO! stared up at him in big, black type from the top of many small sheets, with the following notices of sales, penalties attached for violations of certain ordinances, and what not.  But there was nothing that should not be there, nothing that could be construed as seditionary in any sense of the word.

Still, some person or persons connected with this place had found it expedient to change four perfectly good and quite expensive tires for four new and perfectly commonplace ones, and the only explanation possible was that the distinctive tread of the expensive ones had been observed.  There must, Starr reasoned, be something else in this place which it would be worth his while to discover.  He therefore went carefully up the grimy stairway to the rooms above.

These were offices of the comfortless type to be found in small towns.  Bare floors, stained with tobacco juice and the dust of the street.  Bare desks and tables, some of them unpainted, homemade affairs, all of them cheap and old.  A stove in the larger office, a few wooden-seated armchairs.  Starr took in the details with a flick here and there of his flashlight that he kept carefully turned away from the green-shaded windows.

News items, used and unused, he found impaled on desk files.  Bills paid and unpaid he found also.  But in the first search he found nothing else, nothing that might not be found in any third-rate newspaper establishment.  He stood in the middle room—­there were three in a row, with an empty, loft-like room behind—­and considered where else he could search.