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.
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