Ironheart

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.

His guess had been a good one. Cig had been brought up on the East River. He had served time in the penitentiaries of three States and expected to test the hospitality of others. Just now he was moving westward because the East was too hot for him. He and a pal had done a job at Jersey City during which they had been forced to croak a guy. Hence his unwilling expedition to the Rockies. Never before had he been farther from the Atlantic than Buffalo, and the vast uninhabited stretches of the West bored and appalled him. He was homesick for the fetid dumps of New York.

The corner of his mouth lifted in a sneer. “Wot’ell would any one want to cross this Gawd-forsaken country fifteen times for unless he was bughouse?”

“If you read the papes you’d know that travel is a lib’ral ejucation. Difference between a man an’ a tree is that one’s got legs to move around with. You ginks on the East Side act like you’re anchored to the Batt’ry an’ the Bowery. Me, I was born there, but I been batterin’ on the road ever since I was knee-high to a duck. A fellow’s got to throw his feet if he wants to learn,” York announced dogmatically.

There was obvious insult in Cig’s half-closed eyes. “’S at what learned you all youse know?” he asked.

“Don’t get heavy, young feller,” advised the blanket stiff. “I’ve knew guys to stay healthy by layin’ off me.”

The young man cooking breakfast barked a summons. “Come an’ get it.”

The tramps moved forward to eat, forgetting for the moment their incipient quarrel. Into tin cups and plates the cook poured coffee and stew. In his light clean build, slender but well-packed, was the promise of the athlete. His movements disappointed this expectation. He slouched, dragging the worn shoes through the cracks of which the flesh was visible. Of the three, he was the only one that was ragged. The coat he wore, which did not match the trousers, was at the last extremity.

One might have guessed his age at twenty-three or four. If it had not been for the sullen expression in the eyes and the smoldering discontent of the face, he might have been good-looking. The reddish hair was short, crisp, and curly, the eyes blue as the Colorado summer sky above, the small head well-shaped and beautifully poised on the sloping column of the neck.

Yet the impression he made on observers was not a pleasant one. His good points were marred by the spirit that found outlet in a sullen manner that habitually grudged the world a smile. He had the skin pigment of the blond, and in the untempered sun of the Rockies should have been tanned to a rich red-brown. Instead, the skin was clammily unhealthy. The eyes were dulled and expressionless.

York ate wolfishly, occasionally using the sleeve of his coat for a napkin. He talked, blatantly and continuously. Cig spoke only at rare intervals, the cook not at all. Within the silent man there simmered a nausea of disgust that included himself and all the universe in which he moved.

In the underworld caste rules more rigidly than in upper strata of society. The sense of superiority is everywhere an admission of weakness. It is the defense of one who lives in a glass house. Since all of these men were failures, each despised the others and cherished his feeling that they were inferior.

“You ’boes turf it with York an’ you’ll always have plenty o’ punk and plaster,” the old tramp swaggered. “Comes to batterin’ I’m there with bells on.”

Translated into English, he meant that if they traveled with him they would have bread and butter enough because he was a first-class beggar.

“To hear youse chew the rag you’re a wiz, ain’t you?” Cig jeered. “I ain’t noticed you diggin’ up any Ritz-Carlton lunches a guy can write home about. How about it, Tug?”

The cook grunted.

“Me, I can tell a mark far as I can see him—know whether he’s good for a flop or a feed,” York continued. “Onct I was ridin’ the rods into Omaha—been punchin’ the wind till I was froze stiff, me ’n’ a pal called Seattle. Shacks an’ the con tried to ditch us. Nothin’ doing. We was right there again when the wheels began to move. In the yards at Omaha we bumps into a gay-cat—like Tug here. He spills the dope that the bulls are layin’ for us. Some mission stiff had beefed on me. No guy with or without brass buttons can throw a scare into old York. No can do. So I says to Seattle, says I—”

York’s story died in his throat. He stood staring, mouth open and chin fallen.

Two men were standing on the edge of the bluff above the bed of the creek. He did not need a second look to tell him that they had come to make trouble.