He went again to a closet that had been built in with boards behind the chimney.  At first glance this held nothing but decrepit brooms, a battered spittoon, and a small pile of greasewood cut to fit the heater in the larger room; but Starr went in and flashed his light around the wall.  He found a door at the farther end, and he knew it for a door only when he passed his hands over the wall and felt it yield.  He pushed it open and went into another room evidently built across one end of the loft, a room cunningly concealed and therefore a room likely to hold secrets.

He hitched his gun forward a little, pushed the door shut behind him, and began to search that room.  Here, as in the outer offices, the first superficial examination revealed nothing out of the way.  But Starr did not go at things superficially.  First the desk came under close scrutiny.  There were no letters; they were too cautious for that, evidently.  He looked in the little stove that stood near the wall where the chimney went up in the closet, and saw that the ashes consisted mostly of charred paper.  But the last ones deposited therein had not yet been lighted, or, more exactly, they had been lighted hastily and had not burned except around the edges.  He lifted out the one on top and the one beneath it.  They were two sheets of copy paper scribbled closely in pencil.  The first was entitled, with heavy underscoring that signified capitals, “Souls in Bondage.”  This sounded interesting, and Starr put the papers in his pocket.  The others were envelopes addressed to Las Nuevas; there was no more than a handful of papers in all.

In a drawer of the desk, which he opened with a skeleton key, he found many small leaflets printed in Mexican.  Since they were headed ALMAS DE CAUTIVERO, he took one and hoped that it would not be missed.  There were other piles of leaflets in other drawers, and he helped himself to a sample of each, and relocked the drawers carefully.  But search as he might, he could find nothing that identified any individual, or even pointed to any individual as being concerned in this propaganda work; nor could he find any mention of the Mexican Alliance.

He went out finally, let the door swing behind him as it seemed accustomed to do, climbed through a window to the veranda that bordered all these rooms like a jutting eyebrow, and slid down a corner post to the street.  It was close to dawn, and Starr had no wish to be found near the place; indeed, he had no wish to be found away from his cabin if any one came there with the breaking of day to watch him.

As he had left the cabin, so he returned to it.  He went back to bed and lay there until sunrise, piecing together the scraps of information he had gleaned.  So far, he felt that he was ahead of the game; that he had learned more about the Alliance than the Alliance had learned about him.

As soon as the light was strong enough for him to read without a lamp, he took from his pocket the papers he had gleaned from the stove, spread out the first and began to decipher the handwriting.  And this is what he finally made out: