"Excuse me," I says to her, "can you tell us somebody that has a room to rent, a cheap room?"
"I'm sorry," she says, and bent her head and went on.
It give me a little cold feeling. It come to me that maybe everything wasn't the way it looked.
"Come on, Mis' Bingy," I says, "it's getting late. We don't want to sleep out here to-night."
The room that we finally found was at the back and up two stairways, and it cost fifty cents more than we thought we'd pay, but we took it.
And now the singing in me that I'd been keeping down while there was things to do, come up through, the little funny singing that was all over me. I took out the two cards—that I'd got only that morning, that seemed, lifetimes back—and laid one of 'em on the bureau. It was Mr. Ember's card. The other one I wouldn't look up till to-morrow when I started out to find my work. But this one was his card, that he'd told me would find him. He'd been on his way back to the city that morning. By now he would be here. And I wasn't going to wait.
I put on my other shoes and a clean waist, and I told Mis' Bingy that I'd be back in a little while. She was going to try to go to sleep. I heard her lock the door before I got to the stairs, and I knew that she'd be afraid all the time that Keddie was going to find her.
Out on the street I asked how to get to the address on the card. It was on the far edge of the town: the policeman begun to tell me which car to take.
"I'll walk," I says.
"It'll take you an hour," says he.