XXXVIII. BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT 269 XXXIX. THE TURN OF A CROOKED TRAIL 277 XL. BETTY DISCOVERS WHY SHE IS YOUNG 284 IRONHEART IRONHEART CHAPTER I TURFING IT A thin wisp of smoke drifted up from the camp at the edge of the wash. It rose languidly, as though affected by the fact that the day was going to be a scorcher. Already, though the morning was young, a fiery sun beat down on the sand so that heat waves shimmered in the air. Occasionally a spark from the crackling cottonwood limbs was caught by a dust whirl and carried toward the field of ripe wheat bordering the creek. Of the campers there were three, all of the genus tramp, but each a variant. They represented different types, these desert trekkers. The gross man lying lazily under the shade of a clump of willows might have stepped straight out of a vaudeville sketch. He was dirty and unkempt, his face bloated and dissipated. From his lax mouth projected an English brier pipe, uncleansably soiled. His clothes hung on him like sacks, wrinkled and dusty, but not ragged. He was too good a hobo to wear anything torn or patched. It was his boast that he could get another suit for the asking any time he needed one. “I’m a blowed-in-the-glass stiff,” he bragged now. “Drilled from Denver to ’Frisco fifteen times, an’ never was a stake man or a shovel bum. Not for a day, ’boes. Ask any o’ the push about old York. They’ll give it to youse straight that he knows the best flops from Cincie to Phillie, an’ that no horstile crew can ditch him when he’s goin’ good.” York was a hobo pure and simple. It was his business in life. For “stew-bums” and “gay-cats,” to use his own phraseology, he had a supreme contempt. His companions were amateurs, from his point of view non-professionals. Neither of them had any pride in turfing it, which is the blanket stiff’s expression for taking to the road. They did not understand York’s vocabulary nor the ethics that were current in his craft. Yet the thin, weasel-faced man with the cigarette drooping from his mouth was no amateur in his own line. He had a prison face, the peculiar distortion of one side of the mouth often seen in confirmed criminals. His light-blue eyes were cold and dead. A film veiled them and snuffed out all expression. “Cig” he called himself, and the name sufficed. On the road surnames were neither asked for nor volunteered. York had sized him up three days before when they had met at Colorado Springs, and he had passed on his verdict to the third member of the party. “A river rat on a vac--hittin’ the grit for a getaway,” he had whispered.