“Seems they had something against him, and the powers that were said he should take poison hemlock. Well, from the account of what happened afterward it seemed to me the man was writing about something he never actually saw because we have a sight of poison hemlock in parts of the country where I’ve lived and it’s a very agonizing death, no way so calm and easy as this man seemed to have it.”
“Man told me later, a man who was up on such things, that Plato wasn’t even there when it happened. I don’t think a man should write things unless he can write the truth about it, or as near as he can come to it. The other book was some sayings by Jefferson, Franklin, and the like, the sort of conclusions any reasonable man comes to in a lifetime.”
“Now I read those books up one side and down the other and nothing in those books told me I was crazy and nothing in them told me I was a wise man, either. So” — he smiled cheerfully — “I just let ‘er rest, an’ that’s a good way to do with arguments.”
Noble mounted the steps and went into the store and Benton stared after him. He spat into the dust. Now what kind of a man was that?
Hack, another of the bysitters, glanced slyly at Benton. “He sure is big,” he commented.
“Size doesn’t make the man!” Benton said contemptuously.
The older man chuckled, looking Benton up and down. “Now that’s what I’ve always said!” Hack agreed. “That’s what I’ll always say!”
The door opened and Noble stepped out. He had two one hundred pound sacks of flour under one arm and held another by the top. He walked to his pack mules and began strapping on the sacks. Then he went around to the corral and returned with three horses. Bringing out more supplies, he strapped them on the pack saddles he had brought along with the horses.
Benton had the feeling he had come out on the short end of the exchange and did not like it. Nor was he sure just how it had happened. He watched Noble loading up with growing displeasure. “Some Mormons tried to settle over there one time and the injuns run ’em out. The Green boys went in there with cattle, and the Greens were killed. You ain’t got a chance back in there alone. There was six or seven of the Greens.
“Besides,” he argued, “how would you make a living? Suppose your cherries grew? Where would you sell ’em?”
Cherry Noble’s chuckle was rich and deep, “Why, friend, I don’t worry about that. The Lord will provide, says I, and when folks come they will find the earth flowering like the gardens of paradise, with fat black cherries growing, and if by chance the injuns get me my trees will still be growing. For I say he who plants a tree is a servant of God, which I heard somewhere long ago. Even if there’s no fruit on the limbs there’ll be shade for the weary and a coolness in summer.”
“You talk like a damned sky pilot,” Benton scoffed.
“Well, I’m not one. Nor am I really what you’d call a religious man, nor a learned one. That feller who gave me the books said, ‘Son, it isn’t how many books you read, it’s what you get from those you do read. You read those books I gave you and neither life, nor death, nor man will hold any fears for you.’ That’s what the man said, and he seems to have been right.”
“You’ll need a lot more than talk if those Piutes jump you!” Benton replied.
Noble chuckled again. “If they don’t understand that kind of talk I can always use this!” He picked an empty whiskey bottle from the dust and flipped it into the air. As the bottle reached its high point he palmed his six-shooter and fired.
The shot smashed the bottle, his second and third shots broke fragments of the bottle into still smaller fragments.
Lay Benton sat down on the top step, shocked and a little sick to the stomach. To think he had been hunting trouble with a man who could shoot like that!
Noble swung into the saddle on the big mule, a huge and handsome creature who only swished his tail at the great weight. “Come visit me,” he invited, “where you find me there will be green grass and trees, and if you give me time there will be black cherries ripening in the sun!”
“He’ll get himself killed,” Benton said sourly.
“Maybe,” Hack agreed, “but injuns take to his kind.”
They watched him ride down the dusty street toward the trail west, and he only stopped once, to let Ruth McGann cross in front of him. She was going over to the Border house to borrow a cup of sugar … at least that was what she said.
They saw that he spoke to her, and they might as well have overheard it because old man Border repeated the words.
Noble drew up and gallantly swept the hat from his head. “Beauty before industry, ma’am. You may pass before I raise a dust that might dim those lovely eyes.”
She looked up at him suspiciously. “My name is Noble,” he said, “and I hope that sometimes I am. They call me Cherry because it’s cherries I plant wherever I’ve time to stop. And your name?”
“Ruth,” she replied, her eyes taking in the great expanse of chest and shoulder, “and where might you be going, riding out that way?”
“Like the Hebrew children,” he said, “I go into the wilderness, but I shall return. I shall come back for you, Ruth, and then you shall say to me as did Ruth of the Bible, ‘Wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God.’ ”
Ruth looked him over coolly. Seventeen and pert, she had hair like fire seen through smoke, and eyes of hazel. The prettiest girl in all that country it was said, but with eyes for no man. “Oh, I will, will I? You’ve a smooth tongue, big man. What else do you have?”
“Two hands and a heart. What else will I need?”
“You’ll need a head,” she replied calmly. “Now be off with you. I have work to do.”
“Well spoken!” He replaced his hat on his head and as Ruth passed on across the street, he added, ” ‘Fare you well, hereafter in a better world than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.'”
Ruth McGann turned on the steps of the Border house and watched him disappear down the trail. It was only a dim trail, for not many went that way and fewer returned. “Who was that?” she asked. “I haven’t seen him before.”
“Some stranger,” Border said, “but a mighty big man. About the biggest I ever did see.”
Ruth crossed the porch and went into the house for her cup of sugar, a strange thing, as old man Border commented, for her ma had bought a barrel of sugar only a few weeks before, looking to a season’s canning. The story was told around the sewing and the knitting circles for days after, and around the horse corrals and in the blacksmith shop as well. She was chided about her big man, but Ruth offered no reply.
A month passed, and then six months, and then Port Giddings came in with three riders. They had crossed the rough country to the west and stopped by the McGanns. “Wild country yonder,” Port said, “but right in the midst of it we found Noble. He asked to be remembered to you, Ruth. He said to tell you when his place was in better shape he’d be coming for you.”
Her eyes flashed, but she said nothing at all. Only when they talked she listened and went on with her sewing.
“The way that valley has changed you wouldn’t believe,” Giddings said. “He’s broken sod on more than a hundred acres and has it planted to corn and oats. He’s got two hundred cherry trees planted and sprouting. Then he rounded up those cattle the Green boys lost, and he’s holding them on meadows thick with grass. He’s using water from those old Mormon irrigation ditches, and he’s cut a lot of hay.
“Best of all, he’s built a stone house that’s the best I’ve seen in this country. That man sure does work hard.”
“What about the Indians?” McGann asked.
“That’s the peculiar part. He seems to have no trouble at all. He located their camp when he first rode into the country, and he went in and had a long talk with the chief and some of the old men. He’s never been bothered.”
Cherry Noble could not have taken oath to that comment. The Indians living nearby had caused no trouble, nor had he made trouble for them. The same could not be said for passing war parties. A raiding band of Piutes had come into the country, stealing horses from the other Indians and at that very moment Noble was hunkered down behind some rocks at a water hole.