lace 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.

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