He did remember, for his memory had been well trained for details.  He knew that his hat had been on the table with the front toward the wall.  It was there now, just as he had flung it down.  He knew that his pillow had been dented with the shape of his head, and that it had lain askew on the bed; it was just as it had been.  Everything—­his boots, his dark coat spread over the back of the chair, his trousers across the foot of the bed—­everything was the same, yet the feeling persisted.

Starr was no more imaginative than he needed to be for the work he had to do.  He was not in the least degree nervous over that work.  Yet he was sure some one had been in the room during his absence, and he could not tell why he was sure.  At least, for ten minutes and more he could not tell why.  Then his eyes lighted upon a cigarette stub lying on the hearth of the little cookstove in one corner of the room.  Starr always used “wheat straw” papers, which were brown.  This cigarette had been rolled in white paper.  He picked it up and discovered that one end was still moist from the lips of the smoker, and the other end was still warm from the fire that had half consumed it.  Starr gave an enlightened sniff and knew it was his olfactory nerves that had warned him of an alien presence there; for the tobacco in this cigarette was not the brand he smoked.

He stood thinking it over; puzzling again over the mystery of their suspicion of him.  He tried to recall some careless act, some imprudent question, an ill-considered remark.  He was giving up the riddle again when that trained memory of his flashed before him a picture that, trivial as it was in itself, yet was as enlightening as the white paper of the cigarette on the stove hearth.

Two days before, just after his last arrival in San Bonito, he had sent a wire to a certain man in El Paso.  The message itself had not been of very great importance, but the man to whom he had sent it had no connection whatever with the Meat Company.  He was, in fact, the go-between in the investigation of the Secret Service.  Through him the War Department issued commands to Starr and his fellows, and through him it kept in touch with the situation.  Starr had used two code words and a number in that message.

And, he now distinctly remembered, the girl who had waited upon him was dark, with a Spanish cast of features.  When she had counted the words and checked the charge and pushed his change across to him, she had given him a keen, appraising look from under her lashes, though the smile she sent with it had given the glance a feminine and wholly flattering interpretation.  Starr remembered that look now and saw in it something more than coquetry.  He remembered, too, that he had glanced back from the doorway and caught her still looking after him; and that he had smiled, and she had smiled swiftly in return and had then turned away abruptly to her work.  To her work?  Starr remembered now that she had turned and spoken to a sulky-faced messenger boy who was sitting slumped down on the curve of his back with his tightly buttoned tunic folded up to his armpits so that his hands could burrow to the very bottom of his pockets.  He had looked up, muttered something, reluctantly removed himself from the chair, and started away.  The boy, too, had the Mexican look.