She paced the hallway, back and forth from one end to the other. The sensible thing was to go downstairs. There were two or three davenports in the lobby. She could sit there and wait for Jake. Sooner or later, he would come back. She sat down on the steps, aware that she had another, more urgent problem. She had drunk so much water that she had to pee desperately. She squeezed her thighs together, jiggled her calves, tried to think about something else. She tried to recall whether there were facilities for ladies and gentlemen in the lobby. She couldn’t possibly ask that surly male hotel clerk. She needed to go so bad her eyes watered. She hurried down the steps, praying her bladder would not let go in the lobby.

She looked around desperately. There was a narrow hall that led to something behind the main desk, but she couldn’t see what was back there. The clerk was helping an elderly couple who were being laboriously fussy over the room they would have. She rushed up the steps to the third floor. For no rational reason, she decided to try the door to their room again, to be certain it really was locked. She pushed so hard that when the door opened, she went stumbling into the room and caught her balance on the brass bedstead. Jake was lying on the bed, his shoes off and his legs crossed, with a newspaper open to the sports pages, trying to read a story about his upcoming fight with Bam-Bam Butterfield. He looked up.

“Where the hell were you?”

“Never mind where I was! Where the hell were you?”

Jake grinned that big silly grin. “I got lost.”

“You what?”

“I got lost. Can’t help it.”

He started to explain, but she cut him off and rushed to the bathroom. She locked the door, turned the water in the sink on as high as it would go to cover the sound, unbuttoned her corset and yanked her drawers down, felt as sweet a release as she had ever known in her life. When she was done, she washed her hands and face, took a deep breath, opened the door.

“All right, mister. Do you want to explain what happened?”

He shrugged. “Put me down in the country and I can walk a straight line for a hundred miles, daylight or dark. Turn me around just one time in a big city and I lose my directions. I tried to ask a couple of folks, but nobody I could find ever heard of this hotel.”

“You were gone more than an hour.”

“It’s a big city, hon. Once you go the wrong way, it’s a long way back.”

“But you lived in Denver. You couldn’t possibly get lost here.”