When it was his turn to enter the office being used for the interrogations, Ranny immediately noticed the incriminating plug, which was sitting squarely in the center of the desk. Forewarned, Ranny was able to keep his eyes off it and to protest his innocence when questioned, although the boss grilled him longer than some of the others, pointing out that Ranny had been seen in that vicinity just last night. Apparently, the crew foreman for that area had arrived at work even earlier than Ranny, and had been driving past the shower building when he noticed a thin stream of steam trailing up the end wall. It was a cool morning, and the place was filled with girls getting ready for the day, a preparation which took some of them an hour or more. The continual cascades of hot water had filled the room with steam, which escaped out the unplugged hole and exposed Ranny's secret. One quick glance into the hole told the foreman that this was not just a natural knothole, and the regular dimensions of it and the plug found lying on the ground just below verified that.
This foreman had a 16-year-old daughter himself, and he was outraged that some pervert had been spying on these innocent young girls. Had he been less upset, he might have thought to catch the perpetrator by hiding nearby and waiting until someone showed up to make use of the hole, but he was too upset by visions of some deviate staring at his own daughter while she was in a shower room to think clearly. He was able to realize that it was in his interest to keep this out of the papers and contained within the ranks of the Cow Palace staff, so he brought in the head of Security and impressed upon him the need for keeping it quiet. But one of the maintenance men overheard the conversation, so word spread rapidly among the men and any hope of nailing the guilty party was lost. The Security boss tried to flush out the perpetrator by informing them that they were going to take fingerprints from the plug and they had everyone's prints on file, so the guilty one might just as well come clean. But Ranny knew that they couldn't get prints from the nail, and he wasn't about to confess to anything, anyway - let them prove it if they could.
Although he had narrowly escaped being caught, Ranny still regretted the loss of that peephole into such a world of forbidden delights. He deeply resented the foreman for having found and exposed his secret. If it hadn't been for that busybody, Ranny could have replaced the plug the next morning, and now six months later he could be feasting his eyes on the sight of more mature women taking showers - and there were certainly lots of these barrel racers and cattlewomen who he would love to see naked. Their lifestyle of physical work and play kept their bodies in shape, but Ranny wasn't going to get to enjoy watching them unclothed.