TEXAS: The Last Days of The Cat

One day last month, a convict, just released from the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, told a Dallas cop the hottest rumor from the prison grapevine: a certain party was offering $50,000 for the assassination of a husky, dark-eyed Dallas gambler named Herbert Noble. The stoolie confided: “They say that this man will buy you a new suit of clothes, give you some running money, a gun or dynamite if you want it, and pay you off when you do the job.”

When Herbert Noble heard the convict’s report, he said: “They’re after me again.” In six years he had survived ten attempts on his life; he was certain that “it was only a matter of time,” and had long since made his own funeral arrangements.

Dogs & Peacocks. Noble’s trials began in 1945; until then, he kicked back 25% of the profits of his crap games for “protection” by Benny Binion, kingpin of Dallas gambling during the war years. When Binion raised the ante to 40%, Noble rebelled. Two “enforcers” went after him in a wild night automobile chase and shot him in the back. About that time, Binion moved to Las Vegas, and Noble retired from gambling to become a rancher and a trader in surplus airplane engines. The feud between them did not die.

In the spring of 1948, a bushwhacker shattered Noble’s right arm with a shotgun blast. On Valentine’s Day, 1949, dynamite was found wired to the starter of his car. That autumn, a rifleman shot him in the leg on the highway. Two months later, his wife Mildred got into his automobile, stepped on the starter and was killed by an explosion. A month after that, a sniper hit Noble with two bullets as he was leaving his house in Dallas. Another shot whanged through the window of his hospital room. Newspapers called Noble “the man with nine lives, The Cat.”

By now, Noble’s hair was white, his face lined, his arms stiff from old wounds. He drove occasionally to Dallas in an armored Ford to buy groceries and beer(he was afraid to drink anything stronger), but always in daylight and always with a rifle lying across his lap as he drove. Most of the time he stayed forted up in the stone house at his ranch. He had rigged floodlights to the eaves on every side and installed watchdogs (heavy-duty Dalmatians and tiny, yapping Chihuahuas). As an additional alarm system, he kept screaming peacocks and cackling guinea hens near the house. He seldom slept until dawn. He sat up, rifle at hand, night after night, drinking beer out of cans and fiddling with airplane parts.

A Homebody. His friends pleaded with him to leave the ranch. “This is my home,” he said. “I won’t be driven out of it.” In a way, he even seemed to enjoy the chillingly dramatic part he was playing. The attempts on his life went on. Another shotgun blast was fired at him from the woods, but his car’s armor saved him. Last March, the engine of his airplane blew up as he started it.

Last week Herbert Noble drove his automobile up to his mailbox. He failed to notice that the dirt of the driveway had been disturbed. Neither his lights nor his Dalmatians nor his Chihuahuas nor his guinea hens nor his peacocks warned him of what was about to happen. Just as he reached for the letters in the box, an explosive planted in his driveway blew Herbert Noble to bits.

In Las Vegas, Benny Binion had an airtight alibi.