"But really I ain't no good, Miss Chandler. As I used to say to my dad, 'if the Lord made me, he must have done it sort of absent mindedly, for he ain't never found no place for me.'"
Imogene arose. She knew this big-hearted, rough hill billy must be tired. She went over and laid her hand lightly on his shoulder and said with a solemn tightening of the throat—"Noah, you are the salt of the earth—and I'd rather have you for a friend than a diamond king."
Noah arose, emotion always made him uncomfortable, and shuffled off to his tent without a word.
But he turned at the entrance to the tent, and looked back. The girl sat quite still, her face turned up toward the stars.
"Well," said Noah to himself, "she's got me all right."
On the fourteenth of June Bob Rogeen and Noah Ezekiel Foster rode through the Red Butte Ranch.
The fields lay before them checkered off into squares by the irrigation ditches, level as a table. The long rows of cotton were five to ten inches high, and of a dark green colour. The stand on most of the fields was almost perfect. One Chinaman with a span of mules cultivated fifty acres.
"Lou Wing is a great farmer," continued Bob, enthusiastically. "He is doing the work for 45 per cent. of the crop. I pay the water and the rent; and of course I have to advance him the money to feed and pay his hands. He has twenty partners with a separate camp for each; and each partner has four Chinamen working for him. That is system, Noah. It certainly looks like riches, doesn't it?"
"All flesh is grass," Noah sighed lugubriously, "except some that's weeds."
"Cotton is going up every day," said Bob. "It was nine cents and a fraction yesterday."