The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Five Page 10

  Suddenly, from down the street a voice shouted “Fire!” John Daniel rushed to the door. One glimpse was enough, down the street, in a direct line with his saloon, a deserted shack was ablaze.

  A glance told him that with the wind there was no chance. That whole side of the street must go, and he owned every building there.

  Suddenly he became aware that nobody was moving to fight the blaze. They were watching, and a few were throwing water on buildings across the street, buildings he did not own. He yelled at them, but there was no response.

  Cursing, he turned on his heel and went into the Palace. Rage filled him, a bitter, futile rage. He was whipped…whipped. But he still had the money.

  He went to his secret drawer and took out the gold. He went to his safe for more, carefully changed into bills for easier carrying. There was more gold under the foundation but that could wait. Now, while the others watched the fire, he would go.

  From his room he brought a pair of saddlebags, kept handy for the purpose, and into them he stuffed bills and gold. Straightening up he turned swiftly and started for the back door. A few steps beyond was the stable and his black horse.

  He stopped abruptly. Bon Caddo stood in the door. “Going someplace, John?” he asked mildly.

  John Daniel stood stock-still, caught in midstride. For the first time he knew fear.

  He was alone. Russ Chito was dead. Bernie Lee was beaten within an inch of his life. The others were scattered, hunting for Caddo. And Caddo was here.

  John Daniel had always accounted himself a brave man. He was not afraid, but there was something indomitable about Caddo.

  “All your life, John Daniel, you’ve lived by murder and robbery, and you’ve gotten away with it. Now your town is burning, Daniel, and you’re going with it.”

  John Daniel’s hand reached for a bottle at the end of the bar and threw it. The bottle missed, shattering against the wall. Bon Caddo started for him.

  John Daniel moved to meet him, since there was no escape. He struck out viciously, and Caddo took the blow coming in without so much as a wince. Then Caddo struck in return, and the blow made Daniel’s knees buckle.

  Caddo moved after him, coolly, relentlessly. “Like hitting women, John? How does it feel to be hit? Do you like killing, John? How does it feel to die?”

  In a wild burst of panic-born strength, John Daniel struck out. The blow caught Caddo coming in again but the power of it staggered him and he tripped over a fallen chair, falling to the floor.

  John Daniel lunged for the back door and made it. With Caddo coming after him he reached the stable.

  His horse was gone!

  Trapped, he turned swiftly, reaching for his gun. In front of Bon Caddo a red eye winked, then winked again. Thunder roared in John Daniel’s ears and a terrible flame seemed to rush through him. He did not see the red eye wink again for he was falling, falling, already dead, into the broken branches of a manzanita.

  There is a place in the Tonto Basin where a long, low ranch house looks out upon a valley. Cottonwood leaves whisper their secrets around the house and on the veranda a woman watches her husband walking up from the barn with his two tall sons. Inside the house a daughter sings songs more haunting than those her mother sang in the Palace, long ago. The big man, whose hair is no longer rust red, pauses by her side.

  Before them, the peace of the meadows, and the tall sons washing for supper in the doorside basins. Inside, the song continues.

  “It’s been a good life, Mother, a good life,” he says quietly.

  Far to the north there is an adobe wall with a bullet buried in it, a bullet nobody ever saw. A smashed elbow bone, covered now by the sand of the wash, lies among the debris of a pack-rat’s nest, and where the manzanita grew there is a whitened skull. In the exact center of that skull are two round bullet holes, less than a half inch apart.

  Big Man

  Cherry Noble rode into Wagonstop on a black mule. He was six feet seven in his socks, and he habitually wore boots. He weighed three hundred and thirty pounds. He swung down from the mule and led it and his three pack animals to water. As he stood by the trough with his mules, the bystanders stared in unadulterated amazement.

  Noble looked up, smiling in a friendly fashion. “What’s off there?” He indicated the country to the west with a bob of his head.

  From where he stood nothing was visible to the west but the sun setting over a weird collection of red spires and tabletopped mountains.

  Lay Benton replied. “Nothin’ but wilderness, some of the wildest, roughest country on earth and some bloodthirsty Indians.”

  “No people?”

  “None.”

  “Water? And grass maybe?”

  “Could be a little. Who knows?”

  “Then that’s where I’ll go. I’ll go there so when folks do come there’ll be a place waiting for them. Sooner or later people come to most every place, and mostly when they get there they are hot and tired. I’ll have grass, water, and beef a-waiting.”

  “You’d be crazy to try,” Benton said. “No white man could live in that country even if the Indians would let him.”

  Cherry Noble’s laugh boomed, his face wrinkling with the memories of old smiles. “They’ll let me stay, and I guess there’s no place a man can’t live if he sets his mind to it.” He slapped a bulging saddlebag. “Know what I’ve got here? Cherry pits, that’s what! When I stop I plan to plant cherries! Ain’t no better fruit, anywhere, and that’s why people call me as they do. Noble’s my name and folks call me Cherry. You could trail me across the country by the trees I’ve planted.”

  Lay Benton was a trouble-hunter, and he did not like Cherry Noble. Lay had been the biggest man around until Noble arrived, and he still considered himself the toughest. The big man’s easy good humor irritated him. “If you go into that country,” he said contemptuously, “you’re a fool!”

  “‘Better to be a fool than a knave,’” quoted Noble. He was smiling, but his eyes were measuring Benton with sudden attention and knowledge.

  Benton came to his feet ready for trouble. “What was that you called me?”

  Cherry Noble walked to the foot of the steps where Benton stood. “Friend,” he spoke gently, still smiling, “I didn’t call you, but if you heard your name just keep a-coming.”

  Benton was irresolute. Something in the easy movement and confidence of the big man disturbed him. “You don’t make sense!” he said irritably. “What’s the matter? Are you crazy?”

  Noble chuckled, his big hands on his hips. “Now as to that,” he said judiciously, “there’s a division of opinion. Some say yes, some say no. Me, I’ve not rightly decided, but at any rate I’m not a very wise man.

  “Feller back in Missouri when I was about hip-high to a short burro, he give me five books, he did. He said, ‘Son, you take these books and you read them. Then you read them through again and then you ponder on ’em. After that you give them to somebody else, but there’ll be something that will stay with you all the days of your life. I’m giving you the greatest gift any man can give to another.’”

  Cherry Noble put one huge booted foot on the step. “Now I read them there books, and more times than twice. One was the Bible, mighty good reading whether a man is of a religious turn or not. Another was a bunch of poetry like by a man named Shakespeare. That one only made occasional sense to me until the third time around and then everything began to fall into place, and it’s stayed in my mind ever since. Then there was a book on law, or that’s what I was told, by Blackstone. Seemed to me that book made a lot of sense, and mostly it was rules and ideas on how folks can get along together. There was another by a man named Plato that seemed to me conversations with some other folks, but one that worried me some was an account of the death of this Socrates.

  “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 d
own behind some rocks at a water hole.

  Luckily, he had glimpsed the Indians at the same time they saw him. He had reached the rocks around the water hole just in time. He shot the nearest Indian from the saddle and the rest of them went to the ground. Noble got the mule down on its side and out of rifle range. He readied his Winchester and reloaded his six-gun.

  It was a long, slow, hot afternoon. There was no water nearer than fifteen miles except what lay in the water hole behind him. He knew that and so did the Piutes, only he had the water and they did not.

  Sweat trickled down the big man’s neck. He took a pull at his canteen and put a reassuring hand on the mule. The animal had been trained from birth for just this eventuality and lay quiet now.

  They came suddenly and with a rush and Noble took his time. He dropped one, then switched his rifle and missed a shot as they disappeared.

  There were at least five Indians still out there. A buzzard soared expectantly overhead. He moved suddenly, farther into the rocks and only in time. A warrior, knife in hand, dove at him from a rock and Noble threw up a hand, grasping the Indian’s knife wrist and literally throwing the man to the ground near the pool.

  Noble put a gun on him and the Indian looked up at him, judging his chances. “No good,” Noble said. “You,” he gestured, “drink!”

  The Indian hesitated. “Drink, damn you!” And the Indian did, then again.

  “Now get up and get out. Tell them to leave me alone. I want no trouble, do you hear? No trouble.

  “You steal even one head from me and I’ll hunt you down and kill you all.” How much the Indian understood he had no idea. “Now go!”

  They went, wanting no more of this big man who lived alone.

  Noble returned to his work. There were more trees to plant, a vegetable garden to fence, traps to be set for rabbits that were playing havoc with his crops.

  Four days later, as if testing him, he found several steers driven off and tracked them to their camp. They had eaten heavily and were sleeping, doubting one lone man would attempt to pursue them.