True Grit

Charles Portis

Praise for True Grit:

‘It’s delightful, everything struck me as just right, from the marvellous title and the bull’s eye opening sentence clear through to the last spunky paragraph’ Ira Levin, author of The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby

‘True Grit is when you are a fourteen-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, and you’ve just shot a dangerous outlaw and the gun’s recoil has sent you backward into a pit, and you are wedged in the pit and sinking fast into the cave below where bats are brushing against your legs, and you reach out for something to hold on to and find a rotting corpse beside you and it’s full of angry rattlers, and then it turns out you didn’t kill the outlaw, he’s up at the rim of the pit laughing at you, about to shoot you – and you don’t lose your nerve. That’s True Grit’ New York Times

‘A beautiful, funny, gripping story … True Grit is true genius’ Book Week

‘Charles Portis is perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America’ Esquire

“Wonderful … a thoroughly engaging – indeed a gripping – book and should be enjoyed by people of all ages’ Cleveland Plain Dealer

‘As delightful to a twelve-year-old as to a cultivated adult, True Grit is uproarious high adventure … a yarn with swagger, colour and song’ Saturday Review

‘True Grit is enthralling’ Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate

‘It is a pleasure to be able to recommend a novel wholeheartedly … an instant classic … read it and have the most fun you’ve had in years, maybe decades’ Newsday

‘It is a delight. Mattie Ross from near Dardanelle, Arkansas, is here to stay, like Huck Finn’ Walker Percy, author of The Moviegoer

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Praise for True Grit

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

By the same author

About the Author

Imprint

For my mother and father

Introduction

It’s a commonplace to say that we ‘love’ a book, but when we say it, we really mean all sorts of things. Sometimes we mean only that we have read a book once and enjoyed it; sometimes we mean that a book was important to us in our youth, though we haven’t picked it up in years; sometimes what we ‘love’ is an impressionistic idea glimpsed from afar (Combray … madeleines … Tante Leonie …) as opposed to the experience of wallowing and plowing through an actual text, and all too often people claim to love books they haven’t read at all. Then there are the books we love so much that we read them every year or two, and know passages of them by heart; that cheer us when we are sick or sad and never fail to amuse us when we take them up at random; that we press on all our friends and acquaintances; and to which we return again and again with undimmed enthusiasm over the course of a lifetime. I think it goes without saying that most books that engage readers on this very high level are masterpieces; and this is why I believe that True Grit by Charles Portis is a masterpiece.

Not only have I loved True Grit since I was a child; it is a book loved passionately by my entire family. I cannot think of another novel – any novel – which is so delightful to so many disparate age groups and literary tastes. Four generations of us fell for it in a swift coup de foudre – starting with my mother’s grandmother, then in her early eighties, who borrowed it from the library and adored it and passed it along to my mother. My mother – her eldest granddaughter – was suspicious. There wasn’t much overlap in their reading matter: my gentle great-grandmother – born in 1890 – was the product of an extremely sheltered life, and a more innocent creature in many respects than are most six year olds today; whereas my mother (in her twenties then) kept books like The Boston Strangler on her bedside table. Purely from a sense of duty, she gave True Grit a try – and was so crazy about it that when she finished it, she turned back to the first page and read it all over again. My own middle-aged grandmother (whose reading habits were rather severe, running to politics and science and history) was smitten by True Grit, too, which was even more remarkable since – apart from the classics of her childhood, and what she called ‘the great books’ – she didn’t even care all that much for fiction. I think she might have been the person who suggested that it be given to me to read. And I was only about ten, but I loved it too, and I’ve loved it ever since.

The plot of True Grit is uncomplicated, and as pure in its way as one of the Canterbury Tales. The opening paragraph sets up the premise of the novel elegantly and economically:

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

The speaker is Mattie Ross, from Yell County near Dardanelle, Arkansas, and the time is the 1870s, shortly after the Civil War. Mattie leaves her grief-stricken mother at home with her younger siblings and sets out after Tom Chaney, the hired man who has killed her father. (‘Chaney said he was from Louisiana. He was a short man with cruel features. I will tell more about his face later.’) But Chaney has joined up with a band of outlaws – the Lucky Ned Pepper gang – and ridden out into the Indian territory, which is under the jurisdiction of US marshals. Mattie wants someone to go after him; and she wants someone who will shoot first and ask questions later. So she asks the sheriff in Fort Smith for the name of the best marshal he knows:

The sheriff thought on it a minute. He said: ‘I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say that Quinn is about the best they have.’

I said, ‘Where can I find this Rooster?’

Movie fans will call to mind the aging John Wayne, who famously portrayed Rooster Cogburn on the screen, but the Rooster of the novel is somewhat younger, in his late forties: a fat, one-eyed character with walrus moustaches, unwashed, malarial, drunk much of the time. He is a veteran of the Confederate Army; and, more particularly, of William Clarke Quantrill’s bloody border gang, notorious in American history for the massacre at Lawrence, Kansas and also for launching the careers of the teenaged Frank and Jessie James. Mattie runs Rooster to ground in his squalid rented room at the back of a Chinese grocery store (‘Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone,’ she remarks, disapprovingly) and he’s happy enough to take Mattie’s money to ride out after her father’s killer – but not to let Mattie come along.

He sat up in the bed. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Hold up. You are not going.’

‘That is part of it,’ said I.

‘It cannot be done.’

‘And why not? You have misjudged me if you think I am silly enough to give you a hundred dollars and watch you ride away. No, I will see the thing done myself.’

Mattie is not the only party after Tom Chaney; so is a vain, good-looking Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf who has already tracked Chaney over several states. LaBoeuf (whose name is pronounced ‘La Beef, and who is somewhat overly proud of his membership in the Rangers) wants to team up with Rooster to bring Chaney back alive and collect the bounty. But the dandy LaBoeuf, clanking along in his ‘great brutal spurs’ and ‘Texas trappings’, is no more interested than Rooster in allowing a fourteen-year-old girl to tag along on a manhunt; moreover, LaBoeuf’s intent is to bring Chaney back to Texas to hang for shooting a Texas state senator in a dispute over a bird dog, a claim which Mattie hotly disputes:

‘Haw, haw,’ said LaBoeuf. ‘It is not important where he hangs, is it?’

‘It is to me. Is it to you?’

‘It means a good deal of money to me. Would not a hanging in Texas serve as well as a hanging in Arkansas?’

‘No. You said yourself they might turn him loose down there. This judge will do his duty.’

‘If they don’t hang him we will shoot him. I can give you my word as a Ranger on that.’

‘I want Chaney to pay for killing my father and not some Texas bird dog.’

‘It will not be for the dog, it will be for the senator, and your father too. He will be just as dead that way, you see, and pay for all his crimes at once.’

‘No, I do not see. That is not the way I look at it.’

Not surprisingly, Rooster and LaBoeuf contrive to slip away from Fort Smith without Mattie. But she strikes out after them; and as hard as they ride, they cannot lose her. (‘What a foolish plan, pitting horses so heavily loaded with men and hardware against a pony so lightly burdened as Blackie!’) Finally, when they cannot get Mattie to turn back, they accept her: first, in anger, as a worrisome tagalong; then, grudgingly, as a mascot and equal of sorts; and at last – as she stands among them and proves herself – a relentless force in her own right.

Like Huckleberry Finn (or The Catcher in the Rye, or even the Bertie and Jeeves stories for that matter) True Grit is a monologue, and the great, abiding pleasure of it that compels the reader to return to it again and again is Mattie’s voice. No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does; but though in all his novels (including those set in the current day) Portis shows his deep understanding of place, True Grit also masters the more complicated subtleties of time. Mattie, having survived her youthful adventure, is recounting her story as an old woman, and Portis is such a genius of a literary mimic that the book reads less like a novel than a first-hand account: the Wild West of the 1870s, as recollected in a spinster’s memory and filtered through the sedate sepia tones of the early 1900s. Mattie’s narrative tone is naive, didactic, hard-headed, and completely lacking in self-consciousness – and, at times, unintentionally hilarious, rather in the manner of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters. And like The Young Visiters (which is largely delightful because it views the most absurd Victorian crotchets as obvious common sense), a great part of True Grit’s charm is in Mattie’s blasé view of frontier America. Shootings, stabbings, and public hangings are recounted frankly and flatly, and often with rather less warmth than the political and personal opinions upon which Mattie digresses. She quotes scripture; she explains and gives advice to the reader; her observations are often overlaid with a decorative glaze of Sunday School piety. And her own very distinctive voice (blunt, unsentimental, yet salted with parlor platitudes) echoes throughout the reported speech of all the other characters – lawmen and outlaws alike – to richly comic effect, as when Rooster remarks austerely of a young prisoner he has brought back alive to stand trial: ‘I should have put a ball in that boy’s head instead of his collarbone. I was thinking about my fee. You will sometimes let money interfere with your notion of what is right.’

Mattie is often compared to her literary ancestor, Huckleberry Finn; but though the two of them share some obvious similarities, in most respects Mattie is a much harder customer than careless, sweet-tempered Huck. Where Huck is barefoot and ‘uncivilized’, living happily in his hogshead barrel, Mattie is a pure product of civilization as a Sunday school teacher in nineteenth-century Arkansas might define it; she is a strait-laced Presbyterian, prim as a poker (‘I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains,’ she says coolly to the drunken Rooster); tidy, industrious, frugal, with a head for figures and a shrewd business sense. Her deadpan manner is reminiscent of Buster Keaton: Mattie, too, is a Great Stone Face; she never cracks a smile when recounting the undignified and ridiculous situations in which she finds herself; and even predicaments of great danger fail to draw violent emotion from her. But this deadpan flatness serves a double purpose in the novel, for if Mattie is humorless, she is also completely lacking in qualities like pity and self-doubt, and her implacable stoniness – while very, very funny – is formidable, too, in a manner reminiscent of old tintypes and cartes des visites of Confederate soldier boys: dead-eye killers with rumpled hair and serious angel faces. One cannot picture Huckleberry Finn in the same light; for while Huck is an adventuresome spirit, duty and discipline are wholly foreign to him; conscripted by any army, any cause, he would desert in short order, slipping away the first chance he got to his easy riverbank life. Mattie on the other hand is the perfect soldier, despite her sex. She is as tireless as a gun dog; and while we laugh at her single-mindedness, we also stand in awe of it. In her Old Testament morality, in her legalistic and exacting turn of mind, in the thunderous blackness of her wrath (‘What a waste! … I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!’) she is less Huck Finn’s little sister than Captain Ahab’s.

True Grit is an adventure story, and though the two books in most respects could not be more different, Mattie’s quest in some ways reflects Dorothy Gale’s in The Wizard of Oz. Practical Dorothy, throughout all her trials, is really only working her way back home to Kansas; while practical Mattie, with her own mission and her own brace of unlikely travelling companions, is riding in the historical shadow of a very different Kansas: the mythical outlaw territory of Quantrill and his Confederate raiders. While Quantrill – a brilliant tactician – was romanticized in some quarters as an outlaw chieftain a la Alexandre Dumas, the massacre he led at the abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, is considered the worst atrocity of the American civil war, and history has tended to view Quantrill as a cold-blooded killer. (One man — shot five times when he tried to surrender – was left for dead by his assailant with the parting advice: ‘Tell old God that the last man you saw on earth was Quantrill.’) Rooster, presumably, has come by some of his famous meanness under Quantrill’s tutelage; the incident with Odus Wharton and the bodies in the fire does seem to have some parallels with unpleasant incidents in historical accounts of raids at Lawrence and Centralia; and certainly he has picked up Quantrill’s reputed habit of riding against his enemy with the reins of his horse between his teeth and a revolver in each hand. And yet it is scoundrelly old Rooster who–like Huck Finn, revolting instinctively against the accepted brutality of his day – rises unexpectedly to True Grit’s moments of justice and nobility. He does this in a number of minor comical respects (as in his satisfying encounter with the two ‘wicked boys’ who are tormenting the mule on the riverbank) not to mention the novel’s extraordinary climax. But perhaps the most gratifying moment in the entire book is when Rooster is jolted from his ambivalence about Mattie by the sight of LaBoeuf falling upon her with a switch:

I began to cry, I could not help it, but more from anger and embarrassment than pain. I said to Rooster, ‘Are you going to let him do this?’

He dropped his cigarette to the ground and said, ‘No, I don’t believe I will. Put your switch away, LaBoeuf. She has got the best of us.’

‘She has not got the best of me,’ replied the Ranger.

Rooster said, ‘That will do, I said.’

LaBoeuf paid him no heed.

Rooster raised his voice and said ‘Put that switch down,

LaBoeuf! Do you hear me talking to you?’

LaBoeuf stopped and looked at him. Then he said, ‘I am going ahead with what I started.’

Rooster pulled his cedar-handled revolver and cocked it with his thumb and threw down on LaBoeuf. He said, ‘It will be the biggest mistake you ever made, you Texas brush-popper.’

True Grit, in short, begins where chivalry meets the frontier – where the old Confederacy starts to merge and shade away into the Wild West. And without giving anything away, I can say that the book ends at a travelling Wild West show in Memphis in the early 1900s: which is to say, at once in the twentieth century and firmly enshrined in myth and legend.

True Grit was first published in 1968. When it came out, Roald Dahl wrote that it was the best novel to come his way in a long time. ‘I was going to say it was the best novel to come my way since … Then I stopped. Since what? What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last twenty?’ Certainly when I was growing up in the 1970s, True Grit was widely thought to be a classic; when I was about fourteen years old, it was read along with Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe in the Honors English classes at my school. Yet (because, I believe, of the John Wayne film, which is good enough but which doesn’t do the book justice) True Grit vanished from the public eye, and my mother and I, along with many other Portis fans, were reduced to scouring used bookstores and buying up whatever stock we could find because the copies we lent out so evangelically were never returned. (In one particularly dark moment, when my mother’s last copy had disappeared and a new one was nowhere to be had, she borrowed the library’s copy and then pretended that she had lost it). Now – thankfully – the book is back in print in America, and I am delighted to have the honor of introducing Bloomsbury’s new reprint in the UK, and of introducing Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn to a new generation of readers.

Donna Tartt
18 April 2004

True Grit

Chapter 1

PEOPLE DO not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

Here is what happened. We had clear title to 480 acres of good bottom land on the south bank of the Arkansas River not far from Dardanelle in Yell County, Arkansas. Tom Chaney was a tenant but working for hire and not on shares. He turned up one day hungry and riding a gray horse that had a filthy blanket on his back and a rope halter instead of a bridle. Papa took pity on the fellow and gave him a job and a place to live. It was a cotton house made over into a little cabin. It had a good roof.

Tom Chaney said he was from Louisiana. He was a short man with cruel features. I will tell more about his face later. He carried a Henry rifle. He was a bachelor about twenty-five years of age.

In November when the last of the cotton was sold Papa took it in his head to go to Fort Smith and buy some ponies. He had heard that a stock trader there named Colonel Stonehill had bought a large parcel of cow ponies from Texas drovers on their way to Kansas and was now stuck with them. He was getting shed of them at bargain rates as he did not want to feed them over the winter. People in Arkansas did not think much of Texas mustang ponies. They were little and mean. They had never had anything but grass to eat and did not weigh over eight hundred pounds.

Papa had an idea they would make good deer-hunting ponies, being hardy and small and able to keep up with the dogs through the brush. He thought he would buy a small string of them and if things worked out he would breed and sell them for that purpose. His head was full of schemes. Anyway, it would be a cheap enough investment to start with, and we had a patch of winter oats and plenty of hay to see the ponies through till spring when they could graze in our big north pasture and feed on greener and juicier clover than they ever saw in the “Lone Star State.” As I recollect, shelled corn was something under fifteen cents a bushel then.

Papa intended for Tom Chaney to stay and look after things on the place while he was gone. But Chaney set up a fuss to go and after a time he got the best of Papa’s good nature. If Papa had a failing it was his kindly disposition. People would use him. I did not get my mean streak from him. Frank Ross was the gentlest, most honorable man who ever lived. He had a common-school education. He was a Cumberland Presbyterian and a Mason and he fought with determination at the battle of Elkhorn Tavern but was not wounded in that “scrap” as Lucille Biggers Langford states in her Yell County Yesterdays. I think I am in a position to know the facts. He was hurt in the terrible fight at Chickamauga up in the state of Tennessee and came near to dying on the way home from want of proper care.

Before Papa left for Fort Smith he arranged for a colored man named Yarnell Poindexter to feed the stock and look in on Mama and us every day. Yarnell and his family lived just below us on some land he rented from the bank. He was born of free parents in Illinois but a man named Bloodworth kidnaped him in Missouri and brought him down to Arkansas just before the war. Yarnell was a good man, thrifty and industrious, and he later became a prosperous house painter in Memphis, Tennessee. We exchanged letters every Christmas until he passed away in the flu epidemic of 1918. To this day I have never met anybody else named Yarnell, white or black. I attended the funeral and visited in Memphis with my brother, Little Frank, and his family.

Instead of going to Fort Smith by steamboat or train, Papa decided he would go on horseback and walk the ponies back all tied together. Not only would it be cheaper but it would be a pleasant outing for him and a good ride. Nobody loved to gad about on a prancing steed more than Papa. I have never been very fond of horses myself although I believe I was accounted a good enough rider in my youth. I never was afraid of animals. I remember once I rode a mean goat through a plum thicket on a dare.

From our place to Fort Smith was about seventy miles as a bird flies, taking you past beautiful Mount Nebo where we had a little summer house so Mama could get away from the mosquitoes, and also Mount Magazine, the highest point in Arkansas, but it might as well have been seven hundred miles for all I knew of Fort Smith. The boats went up there and some people sold their cotton up there but that was all I knew about it. We sold our cotton down in Little Rock. I had been there two or three times.

Papa left us on his saddle horse, a big chestnut mare with a blazed face called Judy. He took some food and a change of clothes rolled up in some blankets and covered with a slicker. This was tied behind his saddle. He wore his belt gun which was a big long dragoon pistol, the cap-and-ball kind that was old-fashioned even at that time. He had carried it in the war. He was a handsome sight and in my memory’s eye I can still see him mounted up there on Judy in his brown woolen coat and black Sunday hat and the both of them, man and beast, blowing little clouds of steam on that frosty morn. He might have been a gallant knight of old. Tom Chaney rode his gray horse that was better suited to pulling a middlebuster than carrying a rider. He had no hand gun but he carried his rifle slung across his back on a piece of cotton plow line. There is trash for you. He could have taken an old piece of harness and made a nice leather strap for it. That would have been too much trouble.

Papa had right around two hundred and fifty dollars in his purse as I had reason to know since I kept his books for him. Mama was never any good at sums and she could hardly spell cat. I do not boast of my own gifts in that direction. Figures and letters are not everything. Like Martha I have always been agitated and troubled by the cares of the day but my mother had a serene and loving heart. She was like Mary and had chosen “that good part.” The two gold pieces that Papa carried concealed in his clothes were a marriage gift from my Grandfather Spurling in Monterey, California.

Little did Papa realize that morning that he was never to see us or hold us again, nor would he ever again harken to the meadowlarks of Yell County trilling a joyous anthem to spring.

The news came like a thunderclap. Here is what happened. Papa and Tom Chaney arrived in Fort Smith and took a room at the Monarch boardinghouse. They called on Stonehill at his stock barn and looked over the ponies. It fell out that there was not a mare in the lot, or a stallion for that matter. The Texas cow-boys rode nothing but geldings for some cow-boy reason of their own and you can imagine they are no good for breeding purposes. But Papa was not to be turned back. He was determined to own some of those little brutes and on the second day he bought four of them for one hundred dollars even, bringing Stonehill down from his asking price of one hundred and forty dollars. It was a good enough buy.

They made plans to leave the next morning. That night Tom Chaney went to a barroom and got into a game of cards with some “riffraff” like himself and lost his wages. He did not take the loss like a man but went back to the room at the boardinghouse and sulled up like a possum. He had a bottle of whiskey and he drank that. Papa was sitting in the parlor talking to some drummers. By and by Chaney came out of the bedroom with his rifle. He said he had been cheated and was going back to the barroom and get his money. Papa said if he had been cheated then they had best go talk to the law about it. Chaney would not listen. Papa followed him outside and told him to surrender the rifle as he was in no fit state to start a quarrel with a gun in his hand. My father was not armed at that time.

Tom Chaney raised his rifle and shot him in the forehead, killing him instantly. There was no more provocation than that and I tell it as it was told to me by the high sheriff of Sebastian County. Some people might say, well, what business was it of Frank Ross to meddle? My answer is this: he was trying to do that short devil a good turn. Chaney was a tenant and Papa felt responsibility. He was his brother’s keeper. Does that answer your question?

Now the drummers did not rush out to grab Chaney or shoot him but instead scattered like poultry while Chaney took my father’s purse from his warm body and ripped open the trouser band and took the gold pieces too. I cannot say how he knew about them. When he finished his thieving he raced to the end of the street and struck the night watchman at the stock barn a fierce blow to the mouth with his rifle stock, knocking him silly. He put a bridle on Papa’s horse Judy and rode out bareback. Darkness swallowed him up. He might have taken the time to saddle the horse or hitched up three spans of mules to a Concord stagecoach and smoked a pipe as it seems no one in that city was after him. He had mistaken the drummers for men. “The wicked flee when none pursueth.”

Chapter 2

LAWYER DAGGETT had gone to Helena to try one of his steamboat suits and so Yarnell and I rode the train to Fort Smith to see about Papa’s body. I took around one hundred dollars expense money and wrote myself out a letter of identification and signed Lawyer Daggett’s name to it and had Mama sign it as well. She was in bed.

There were no seats to be had on the coaches. The reason for this was that there was to be a triple hanging at the Federal Courthouse in Fort Smith and people from as far away as east Texas and north Louisiana were going up to see it. It was like an excursion trip. We rode in a colored coach and Yarnell got us a trunk to sit on.

When the conductor came through he said, “Get that trunk out of the aisle, nigger!”

I replied to him in this way: “We will move the trunk but there is no reason for you to be so hateful about it.”

He did not say anything to that but went on taking tickets. He saw that I had brought to all the darkies’ attention how little he was. We stood up all the way but I was young and did not mind. On the way we had a good lunch of spare ribs that Yarnell had brought along in a sack.

I noticed that the houses in Fort Smith were numbered but it was no city at all compared to Little Rock. I thought then and still think that Fort Smith ought to be in Oklahoma instead of Arkansas, though of course it was not Oklahoma across the river then but the Indian Territory. They have that big wide street there called Garrison Avenue like places out in the west. The buildings are made of fieldstone and all the windows need washing. I know many fine people live in Fort Smith and they have one of the nation’s most modern waterworks but it does not look like it belongs in Arkansas to me.

There was a jailer at the sheriff’s office and he said we would have to talk to the city police or the high sheriff about the particulars of Papa’s death. The sheriff had gone to the hanging. The undertaker was not open. He had left a notice on his door saying he would be back after the hanging. We went to the Monarch boardinghouse but there was no one there except a poor old woman with cataracts on her eyes. She said everybody had gone to the hanging but her. She would not let us in to see about Papa’s traps. At the city police station we found two officers but they were having a fist fight and were not available for inquiries.

Yarnell wanted to see the hanging but he did not want me to go so he said we should go back to the sheriff’s office and wait there until everybody got back. I did not much care to see it but I saw he wanted to so I said no, we would go to the hanging but I would not tell Mama about it. That was what he was worried about.

The Federal Courthouse was up by the river on a little rise and the big gallows was hard beside it. About a thousand or more people and fifty or sixty dogs had gathered there to see the show. I believe a year or two later they put up a wall around the place and you had to have a pass from the marshal’s office to get in but at this time it was open to the public. A noisy boy was going through the crowd selling parched peanuts and fudge. Another one was selling “hot tamales” out of a bucket. This is a cornmeal tube filled with spicy meat that they eat in Old Mexico. They are not bad. I had never seen one before.

When we got there the preliminaries were just about over. Two white men and an Indian were standing up there on the platform with their hands tied behind them and the three nooses hanging loose beside their heads. They were all wearing new jeans and flannel shirts buttoned at the neck. The hangman was a thin bearded man named George Maledon. He was wearing two long pistols. He was a Yankee and they say he would not hang a man who had been in the G.A.R. A marshal read the sentences but his voice was low and we could not make out what he was saying. We pushed up closer.

A man with a Bible talked to each of the men for a minute. I took him for a preacher. He led them in singing “Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound” and some people in the crowd joined in. Then Maledon put the nooses on their necks and tightened up the knots just the way he wanted them. He went to each man with a black hood and asked him if he had any last words before he put it on him.

The first one was a white man and he looked put out by it all but not upset as you might expect from a man in his desperate situation. He said, “Well, I killed the wrong man and that is why I am here. If I had killed the man I meant to I don’t believe I would have been convicted. I see men out there in that crowd that is worse than me.”

The Indian was next and he said, “I am ready. I have repented my sins and soon I will be in heaven with Christ my savior. Now I must die like a man.” If you are like me you probably think of Indians as heathens. But I will ask you to recall the thief on the cross. He was never baptized and never even heard of a catechism and yet Christ himself promised him a place in heaven.

The last one had a little speech ready. You could tell he had learned it by heart. He had long yellow hair. He was older than the other two, being around thirty years of age. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, my last thoughts are of my wife and my two dear little boys who are far away out on the Cimarron River. I don’t know what is to become of them. I hope and pray that people will not slight them and compel them to go into low company on account of the disgrace I have brought them. You see what I have come to because of drink. I killed my best friend in a trifling quarrel over a pocketknife. I was drunk and it could just as easily have been my brother. If I had received good instruction as a child I would be with my family today and at peace with my neighbors. I hope and pray that all you parents in the sound of my voice will train up your children in the way they should go. Thank you. Goodbye everyone.”

He was in tears and I am not ashamed to own that I was too. The man Maledon covered his head with the hood and went to his lever. Yarnell put a hand over my face but I pushed it aside. I would see it all. With no more ado Maledon sprung the trap and the hinged doors fell open in the middle and the three killers dropped to judgment with a bang. A noise went up from the crowd as though they had been struck a blow. The two white men gave no more signs of life. They spun slowly around on the tight creaking ropes. The Indian jerked his legs and arms up and down in spasms. That was the bad part and many in the crowd turned in revulsion and left in some haste, and we were among them.

We were told that the Indian’s neck had not been broken, as was the case with the other two, and that he swung there and strangled for more than a half hour before a doctor pronounced him dead and had him lowered. They say the Indian had lost weight in jail and was too light for a proper job. I have since learned that Judge Isaac Parker watched all his hangings from an upper window in the Courthouse. I suppose he did this from a sense of duty. There is no knowing what is in a man’s heart.

Perhaps you can imagine how painful it was for us to go directly from that appalling scene to the undertaker’s where my father lay dead. Nevertheless it had to be done. I have never been one to flinch or crawfish when faced with an unpleasant task. The undertaker was an Irishman. He took Yarnell and me to a room at the back that was very dark owing to the windows being painted green. The Irishman was courteous and sympathetic but I did not much like the coffin he had placed Papa in. It was resting on three low stools and was made of pine planks that had not been cleanly dressed. Yarnell took off his hat.

The Irishman said, “And is that the man?” He held a candle in his face. The body was wrapped in a white shroud.

I said, “That is my father.” I stood there looking at him. What a wastel Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!

The Irishman said, “If ye would loike to kiss him it will be all roight.”

I said, “No, put the lid on it.”

We went to the man’s office and I signed some coroner’s papers. The charge for the coffin and the embalming was something over sixty dollars. The shipping charge to Dardanelle was $9.50.

Yarnell took me outside the office. He said, “Miss Mattie, that man trying to stick you.”

I said, “Well, we will not haggle with him.”

He said, “That is what he counting on.”

I said, “We will let it go.”

I paid the Irishman his money and got a receipt. I told Yarnell to stay with the coffin and see that it was loaded on the train with care and not handled roughly by some thoughtless railroad hand.

I went to the sheriff’s office. The high sheriff was friendly and he gave me the full particulars on the shooting, but I was disappointed to learn how little had been done toward the apprehension of Tom Chaney. They had not even got his name right.

The sheriff said, “We do know this much. He was a short man but well set up. He had a black mark on his cheek. His name is Chambers. He is now over in the Territory and we think he was in the party with Lucky Ned Pepper that robbed a mail hack Tuesday down on the Poteau River.”

I said, “That is the description of Tom Chaney, there is no Chambers to it. He got that black mark in Louisiana when a man shot a pistol in his face and the powder got under the skin. Anyhow, that is his story. I know him and can identify him. Why are you not out looking for him?”

The sheriff said, “I have no authority in the Indian Nation. He is now the business of the U.S. marshals.”

I said, “When will they arrest him?”

He said, “It is hard to say. They will have to catch him first.”

I said, “Do you know if they are even after him?”

He said, “Yes, I have asked for a fugitive warrant and I expect there is a Federal John Doe warrant on him now for the mail robbery. I will inform the marshals as to the correct name.”

“I will inform them myself,” said I. “Who is the best marshal they have?”

The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, “I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L. T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.”

I said, “Where can I find this Rooster?”

He said, “You will probably find him in Federal Court tomorrow. They will be trying that Wharton boy.”

The sheriff had Papa’s gun belt there in a drawer and he gave it to me in a sugar sack to carry. The clothes and blankets were at the boardinghouse. The man Stonehill had the ponies and Papa’s saddle at his stock barn. The sheriff wrote me out a note for the man Stonehill and the landlady at the boardinghouse, who was a Mrs. Floyd. I thanked him for his help. He said he wished he could do more.

It was around 5:30 P.M. when I got to the depot. The days were growing short and it was already dark. The southbound train was to leave some few minutes after 6 o’clock. I found Yarnell waiting outside the freight car where he had loaded the coffin. He said the express agent had consented to let him ride in the car with the coffin.

He said he would go help me find a seat in a coach but I said, “No, I will stay over a day or two. I must see about those ponies and I want to make sure the law is on the job. Chaney has got clean away and they are not doing much about it.”

Yarnell said, “You can’t stay in this city by yourself.”

I said, “It will be all right. Mama knows I can take care of myself. Tell her I will be stopping at the Monarch boardinghouse. If there is no room there I will leave word with the sheriff where I am.”

He said, “I reckon I will stay too.”

I said, “No, I want you to go with Papa. When you get home tell Mr. Myers I said to put him in a better coffin.”

“Your mama will not like this,” said he.

“I will be back in a day or two. Tell her I said not to sign anything until I get home. Have you had anything to eat?”

“I had me a cup of hot coffee. I ain’t hongry.”

“Do they have a stove in that car?”

“I will be all right wrapped in my coat.”

“I sure do appreciate this, Yarnell.”

“Mr. Frank was always mighty good to me.”

Some people will take it wrong and criticize me for not going to my father’s funeral. My answer is this: I had my father’s business to attend to. He was buried in his Mason’s apron by the Danville lodge.

I got to the Monarch in time to eat. Mrs. Floyd said she had no vacant room because of the big crowd in town but that she would put me up somehow. The daily rate was seventy-five cents a night with two meals and a dollar with three meals. She did not have a rate for one meal so I was obliged to give her seventy-five cents even though I had planned to buy some cheese and crackers the next morning for my daytime eats. I don’t know what her weekly rate was.

There were ten or twelve people at the supper table and all men except for me and Mrs. Floyd and the poor old blind woman who was called “Grandma Turner.” Mrs. Floyd was a right big talker. She explained to everybody that I was the daughter of the man who had been shot in front of her house. I did not appreciate it. She told about the event in detail and asked me impertinent questions about my family. It was all I could do to reply politely. I did not wish to discuss the thing with idly curious strangers, no matter how well intentioned they might be.

I sat at one corner of the table between her and a tall, long-backed man with a doorknob head and a mouthful of prominent teeth. He and Mrs. Floyd did most of the talking. He traveled about selling pocket calculators. He was the only man there wearing a suit of clothes and a necktie. He told some interesting stories about his experiences but the others paid little attention to him, being occupied with their food like hogs rooting in a bucket.

“Watch out for those chicken and dumplings,” he told me.

Some of the men stopped eating.

“They will hurt your eyes,” he said.

A dirty man across the table in a smelly deerskin coat said, “How is that?”

With a mischievous twinkle the drummer replied, “They will hurt your eyes looking for the chicken.” I thought it a clever joke but the dirty man said angrily, “You squirrelheaded son of a bitch,” and went back to eating. The drummer kept quiet after that. The dumplings were all right but I could not see twenty-five cents in a little flour and grease.

After supper some of the men left to go to town, probably to drink whiskey in the barrooms and listen to the hurdy-gurdy. The rest of us went to the parlor. The boarders dozed and read newspapers and talked about the hanging and the drummer told yellow fever jokes. Mrs. Floyd brought out Papa’s things that were bundled in the slicker and I went through them and made an inventory.

Everything seemed to be there, even his knife and watch. The watch was of brass and not very expensive but I was surprised to find it because people who will not steal big things will often steal little things like that. I stayed in the parlor and listened to the talk for a while and then asked Mrs. Floyd if she would show me to my bed.

She said, “Go straight down that hall to the last bedroom on the left. There is a bucket of water and a washpan on the back porch. The toilet is out back directly behind the chinaberry tree. You will be sleeping with Grandma Turner.”

She must have seen the dismay on my face for she added, “It will be all right. Grandma Turner will not mind. She is used to doubling up. She will not even know you are there, sweet.”

Since I was the paying customer I believed my wishes should have been considered before Grandma Turner’s, though it seemed neither of us was to have any say.

Mrs. Floyd went on, saying, “Grandma Turner is a sound sleeper. It is certainly a blessing at her age. Do not worry about waking Grandma Turner, a little mite like you.”

I did not mind sleeping with Grandma Turner but I thought Mrs. Floyd had taken advantage of me. Still, I saw nothing to be gained from making a fuss at that hour. She already had my money and I was tired and it was too late to look for lodging elsewhere.

The bedroom was cold and dark and smelled like medicine. A wintry blast came up through the cracks in the floor. Grandma Turner turned out to be more active in her slumber than I had been led to expect. When I got into bed I found she had all the quilts on her side. I pulled them over. I said my prayers and was soon asleep. I awoke to find that Grandma Turner had done the trick again. I was bunched up in a knot and trembling with cold from the exposure. I pulled the covers over again. This happened once more later in the night and I got up, my feet freezing, and arranged Papa’s blankets and slicker over me as makeshift covers. Then I slept all right.

Chapter 3

MRS. FLOYD served me no meat for breakfast, only grits and a fried egg. After eating I put the watch and knife in my pocket and took the gun along in the sugar sack.

At the Federal Courthouse I learned that the head marshal had gone to Detroit, Michigan, to deliver prisoners to the “house of correction,” as they called it. A deputy who worked in the office said they would get around to Tom Chaney in good time, but that he would have to wait his turn. He showed me a list of indicted outlaws that were then on the loose in the Indian Territory and it looked like the delinquent tax list that they run in the Arkansas Gazette every year in little type. I did not like the looks of that, nor did I care much for the “smarty” manner of the deputy. He was puffed up by his office. You can expect that out of Federal people and to make it worse this was a Republican gang that cared nothing for the opinion of the good people of Arkansas who are Democrats.

In the courtroom itself they were empaneling a jury. The bailiff at the door told me that the man Rooster Cogburn would be around later in the day when the trial began as he was the main witness for the prosecution.

I went to Stonehill’s stock barn. He had a nice barn and behind it a big corral and a good many small feeder pens. The bargain cow ponies, around thirty head, all colors, were in the corral. I thought they would be broken-down scrubs but they were frisky things with clear eyes and their coats looked healthy enough, though dusty and matted. They had probably never known a brush. They had burrs in their tails.

I had hated these ponies for the part they played in my father’s death but now I realized the notion was fanciful, that it was wrong to charge blame to these pretty beasts who knew neither good nor evil but only innocence. I say that of these ponies. I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious “claptrap.” My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33.

Stonehill had an office in one corner of the barn. On the door glass it said, “Col. G. Stonehill. Licensed Auctioneer. Cotton Factor.” He was in there behind his desk and he had a red-hot stove going. He was a prissy baldheaded man with eyeglasses.

I said, “How much are you paying for cotton?”

He looked up at me and said, “Nine and a half for low middling and ten for ordinary.”

I said, “We got most of ours out early and sold it to Woodson Brothers in Little Rock for eleven cents.”

He said, “Then I suggest you take the balance of it to the Woodson Brothers.”

“We have sold it all,” said I. “We only got ten and a half on the last sale.”

“Why did you come here to tell me this?”

“I thought we might shop around up here next year, but I guess we are doing all right in Little Rock.” I showed him the note from the sheriff. After he had read it he was not disposed to be so short with me.

He took off his eyeglasses and said, “It was a tragic thing. May I say your father impressed me with his manly qualities. He was a close trader but he acted the gentleman. My watchman had his teeth knocked out and can take only soup.”

I said, “I am sorry to hear it.”

He said, “The killer has flown to the Territory and is now on the scout there.”

“This is what I heard.”

“He will find plenty of his own stamp there,” said he. “Birds of a feather. It is a sink of crime. Not a day goes by but there comes some new report of a farmer bludgeoned, a wife outraged, or a blameless traveler set upon and cut down in a sanguinary ambuscade. The civilizing arts of commerce do not flourish there.”

I said, “I have hopes that the marshals will get him soon. His name is Tom Chaney. He worked for us. I am trying to get action. I aim to see him shot or hanged.”

“Yes, yes, well might you labor to that end,” said Stonehill. “At the same time I will counsel patience. The brave marshals do their best but they are few in number. The lawbreakers are legion and they range over a vast country that offers many natural hiding places. The marshal travels about friendless and alone in that criminal nation. Every man’s hand is against him there save in large part for that of the Indian who has been cruelly imposed upon by felonious intruders from the States.”

I said, “I would like to sell those ponies back to you that my father bought.”

He said, “I fear that is out of the question. I will see that they are shipped to you at my earliest convenience.”

I said, “We don’t want the ponies now. We don’t need them.”

“That hardly concerns me,” said he. “Your father bought these ponies and paid for them and there is an end of it. I have the bill of sale. If I had any earthly use for them I might consider an offer but I have already lost money on them and, be assured, I do not intend to lose more. I will be happy to accommodate you in shipping them. The popular steamer Alice Waddell leaves tomorrow for Little Rock. I will do what I can to find space on it for you and the stock.”

I said, “I want three hundred dollars for Papa’s saddle horse that was stolen.”

He said, “You will have to take that up with the man who has the horse.”

“Tom Chaney stole it while it was in your care,” said I. “You are responsible.”

Stonehill laughed at that. He said, “I admire your stand but I believe you will find I am not liable for such claims. Let me say too that your valuation of the horse is high by about two hundred dollars.”

I said, “If anything, my price is low. Judy is a fine racing mare. She has won purses of twenty-five dollars at the fair. I have seen her jump an eight-rail fence with a heavy rider.”

“All very interesting, I’m sure,” said he.

“Then you will offer nothing?”

“Nothing except what is yours. The ponies are yours, take them. Your father’s horse was stolen by a murderous criminal. This is regrettable but I had provided reasonable protection for the animal as per the implicit agreement with the client. We must each of us bear our own misfortunes. Mine is that I have temporarily lost the services of my watchman.”

“I will take it to law,” said I.

“You must do as you think best,” said he.

“We will see if a widow and her three small children can get fair treatment in the courts of this city.”

“You have no case.”

“Lawyer J. Noble Daggett of Dardanelle, Arkansas, may think otherwise. Also a jury.”

“Where is your mother?”

“She is at home in Yell County looking after my sister Victoria and my brother Little Frank.”

“You must fetch her then. I do not like to deal with children.”

“You will not like it any better when Lawyer Daggett gets hold of you. He is a grown man.”

“You are impudent.”

“I do not wish to be, sir, but I will not be pushed about when I am in the right.”

“I will take it up with my attorney.”

“And I will take it up with mine. I will send him a message by telegraph and he will be here on the evening train. He will make money and I will make money and your lawyer will make money and you, Mr. Licensed Auctioneer, will foot the bill.”

“I cannot make an agreement with a child. You are not accountable. You cannot be bound to a contract.”

“Lawyer Daggett will back up any decision I make. You may rest easy on that score. You can confirm any agreement by telegraph.”

“This is a damned nuisance!” he exclaimed. “How am I to get my work done? I have a sale tomorrow.”

“There can be no settlement after I leave this office,” said I. “It will go to law.”

He worried with his eyeglasses for a minute and then said, “I will pay two hundred dollars to your father’s estate when I have in my hand a letter from your lawyer absolving me of all liability from the beginning of the world to date. It must be signed by your lawyer and your mother and it must be notarized. The offer is more than liberal and I only make it to avoid the possibility of troublesome litigation. I should never have come here. They told me this town was to be the Pittsburgh of the Southwest.”

I said, “I will take two hundred dollars for Judy, plus one hundred dollars for the ponies and twenty-five dollars for the gray horse that Tom Chaney left. He is easily worth forty dollars. That is three hundred and twenty-five dollars total.”

“The ponies have no part in this,” said he. “I will not buy them.”

“Then I will keep the ponies and the price for Judy will be three hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

Stonehill snorted. “I would not pay three hundred and twenty-five dollars for winged Pegasus, and that splayfooted gray does not even belong to you.”

I said, “Yes, he does. Papa only let Tom Chaney have the use of him.”

“My patience is wearing thin. You are an unnatural child. I will pay two hundred and twenty-five dollars and keep the gray horse. I don’t want the ponies.”

“I cannot settle for that.”

“This is my last offer. Two hundred and fifty dollars. For that I get a release and I keep your father’s saddle. I am also writing off a feed and stabling charge. The gray horse is not yours to sell.”

“The saddle is not for sale. I will keep it. Lawyer Daggett can prove the ownership of the gray horse. He will come after you with a writ of replevin.”

“All right, now listen very carefully as I will not bargain further. I will take the ponies back and keep the gray horse and settle for three hundred dollars. Now you must take that or leave it and I do not much care which it is.”

I said, “I am sure Lawyer Daggett would not wish me to consider anything under three hundred and twenty-five dollars. What you get for that is everything except the saddle and you get out of a costly lawsuit as well. It will go harder if Lawyer Daggett makes the terms as he will include a generous fee for himself.”

“Lawyer Daggett! Lawyer Daggett! Who is this famous pleader of whose name I was happily ignorant ten minutes ago?”

I said, “Have you ever heard of the Great Arkansas River, Vicksburg & Gulf Steamship Company?”

“I have done business with the G.A.V.&G.,” said he.

“Lawyer Daggett is the man who forced them into receivership,” said I. “They tried to ‘mess’ with him. It was a feather in his cap. He is on familiar terms with important men in Little Rock. The talk is he will be governor one day.”

“Then he is a man of little ambition,” said Stonehill, “incommensurate with his capacity for making mischief. I would rather be a country road overseer in Tennessee than governor of this benighted state. There is more honor in it.”

“If you don’t like it here you should pack your traps and go back where you came from.”

“Would that I could get out from under!” said he. “I would be aboard the Friday morning packet with a song of thanksgiving on my lips.”

“People who don’t like Arkansas can go to the devil!” said I “What did you come here for?”

“I was sold a bill of goods.”

“Three hundred and twenty-five dollars is my figure.”

“I would like to have that in writing for what it is worth.” He wrote out a short agreement. I read it over and made a change or two and he initialed the changes. He said, “Tell your lawyer to send the letter to me here at Stonehill’s Livery Stable. When I have it in my hand I will remit the extortion money. Sign this.”

I said, “I will have him send the letter to me at the Monarch boardinghouse. When you give me the money I will give you the letter. I will sign this instrument when you have given me twenty-five dollars as a token of your good faith.” Stonehill gave me ten dollars and I signed the paper.

I went to the telegraph office. I tried to keep the message down but it took up almost a full blank setting forth the situation and what was needed. I told Lawyer Daggett to let Mama know I was well and would be home soon. I forget what it cost.

I bought some crackers and a piece of hoop cheese and an apple at a grocery store and sat on a nail keg by the stove and had a cheap yet nourishing lunch. You know what they say, “Enough is as good as a feast.” When I had finished eating I returned to Stonehill’s place and tried to give the apple core to one of the ponies. They all shied away and would have nothing to do with me or my gift. The poor things had probably never tasted an apple. I went inside the stock barn out of the wind and lay down on some oat sacks. Nature tells us to rest after meals and people who are too busy to heed that inner voice are often dead at the age of fifty years.

Stonehill came by on his way out wearing a little foolish Tennessee hat. He stopped and looked at me.

I said, “I am taking a short nap.”

He said, “Are you quite comfortable?”

I said, “I wanted to get out of the wind. I figured you would not mind.”

“I don’t want you smoking cigarettes in here.”

“I don’t use tobacco.”

“I don’t want you punching holes in those sacks with your boots.”

“I will be careful. Shut that door good when you go out.”

I had not realized how tired I was. It was well up in the afternoon when I awoke. I was stiff and my nose had begun to drip, sure sign of a cold coming on. You should always be covered while sleeping. I dusted myself off and washed my face under a pump and picked up my gun sack and made haste to the Federal Courthouse.

When I got there I saw that another crowd had gathered, although not as big as the one the day before. My thought was: What? Surely they are not having another hanging! They were not. What had attracted the people this time was the arrival of two prisoner wagons from the Territory.

The marshals were unloading the prisoners and poking them sharply along with their Winchester repeating rifles. The men were all chained together like fish on a string. They were mostly white men but there were also some Indians and half-breeds and Negroes. It was awful to see but you must remember that these chained beasts were murderers and robbers and train wreckers and bigamists and counterfeiters, some of the most wicked men in the world. They had ridden the “hoot-owl trail” and tasted the fruits of evil and now justice had caught up with them to demand payment. You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.

The prisoners who were already in the jail, which was in the basement of the Courthouse, commenced to shout and catcall through little barred windows at the new prisoners, saying, “Fresh fish!” and such like. Some of them used ugly expressions so that the women in the crowd turned their heads. I put my fingers in my ears and walked through the people up to the steps of the Courthouse and inside.

The bailiff at the door did not want to let me in the courtroom as I was a child but I told him I had business with Marshal Cogburn and held my ground. He saw I had spunk and he folded right up, not wanting me to cause a stir. He made me stand beside him just inside the door but that was all right because there were no empty seats anyway. People were even sitting on windowsills.

You will think it strange but I had scarcely heard of Judge Isaac Parker at that time, famous man that he was. I knew pretty well what was going on in my part of the world and I must have heard mention of him and his court but it made little impression on me. Of course we lived in his district but we had our own circuit courts to deal with killers and thieves. About the only outlaws in our country who ever went to Federal Court were “moonshiners” like old man Jerry Vick and his boys. Most of Judge Parker’s customers came from the Indian Territory which was a refuge for desperadoes from all over the map.

Now I will tell you an interesting thing. For a long time there was no appeal from his court except to the President of the United States. They later changed that and when the Supreme Court started reversing him, Judge Parker was annoyed. He said those people up in Washington city did not understand the bloody conditions in the Territory. He called Solicitor-General Whitney, who was supposed to be on the judge’s side, a “pardon broker” and said he knew no more of criminal law than he did of the hieroglyphics of the Great Pyramid. Well, for their part, those people up there said the judge was too hard and highhanded and too long-winded in his jury charges and they called his court “the Parker slaughterhouse.” I don’t know who was right. I know sixty-five of his marshals got killed. They had some mighty tough folks to deal with.

The judge was a tall big man with blue eyes and a brown billy-goat beard and he seemed to me to be old, though he was only around forty years of age at that time. His manner was grave. On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make. It is something to think about. Toward the last, he said he didn’t hang all those men, that the law had done it. When he died of dropsy in 1896 all the prisoners down there in that dark jail had a “jubilee” and the jailers had to put it down.

I have a newspaper record of a part of that Wharton trial and it is not an official transcript but it is faithful enough. I have used it and my memories to write a good historical article that I titled, You will now listen to the sentence of the law, Odus Wharton, which is that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead! May God, whose laws you have broken and before whose dread tribunal you must appear, have mercy on your soul. Being a personal recollection of Isaac C. Parker, the famous Border Judge.

But the magazines of today do not know a good story when they see one. They would rather print trash. They say my article is too long and “discursive.” Nothing is too long or too short either if you have a true and interesting tale and what I call a “graphic” writing style combined with educational aims. I do not fool around with newspapers. They are always after me for historical write-ups but when the talk gets around to money the paper editors are most of them “cheap skates.” They think because I have a little money I will be happy to fill up their Sunday columns just to see my name in print like Lucille Biggers Langford and Florence Mabry Whiteside. As the little colored boy says, “Not none of me!” Lucille and Florence can do as they please. The paper editors are great ones for reaping where they have not sown. Another game they have is to send reporters out to talk to you and get your stories free. I know the young reporters are not paid well and I would not mind helping those boys out with their “scoops” if they could ever get anything straight.

When I got in the courtroom there was a Creek Indian boy on the witness stand and he was speaking in his own tongue and another Indian was interpreting for him. It was slow going. I stood there through almost an hour of it before they called Rooster Cogburn to the stand.

I had guessed wrong as to which one he was, picking out a younger and slighter man with a badge on his shirt, and I was surprised when an old one-eyed jasper that was built along the lines of Grover Cleveland went up and was sworn. I say “old.” He was about forty years of age. The floor boards squeaked under his weight. He was wearing a dusty black suit of clothes and when he sat down I saw that his badge was on his vest. It was a little silver circle with a star in it. He had a mustache like Cleveland too.

Some people will say, well there were more men in the country at that time who looked like Cleveland than did not. Still, that is how he looked. Cleveland was once a sheriff himself. He brought a good deal of misery to the land in the Panic of ’93 but I am not ashamed to own that my family supported him and has stayed with the Democrats right on through, up to and including Governor Alfred Smith, and not only because of Joe Robinson. Papa used to say that the only friends we had down here right after the war were the Irish Democrats in New York. Thad Stevens and the Republican gang would have starved us all out if they could. It is all in the history books. Now I will introduce Rooster by way of the transcript and get my story “back on the rails.”

MR. BARLOW: State your name and occupation please.

MR. COGBURN: Reuben J. Cogburn. I am a deputy marshal for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas having criminal jurisdiction over the Indian Territory.

MR. BARLOW: How long have you occupied such office?

MR. COGBURN: Be four years in March.

MR. BARLOW: On November second were you carrying out your official duties?

MR. COGBURN: I was, yes sir.

MR. BARLOW: Did something occur on that day out of the ordinary?

MR. COGBURN: Yes sir.

MR. BARLOW: Please describe in your own words what that occurrence was.

MR. COGBURN: Yes sir. Well, not long after dinner on that day we was headed back for Fort Smith from the Creek Nation and was about four miles west of Webbers Falls.

MR. BARLOW: One moment. Who was with you?

MR. COGBURN: There was four other deputy marshals and me. We had a wagonload of prisoners and was headed back for Fort Smith. Seven prisoners. About four mile west of Webbers Falls that Creek boy named Will come riding up in a lather. He had news. He said that morning he was taking some eggs over to Tom Spotted-Gourd and his wife at their place on the Canadian River. When he got there he found the woman out in the yard with the back of her head shot off and the old man inside on the floor with a shotgun wound in his breast.

MR. GOUDY: An objection.

JUDGE FARKER: Confine your testimony to what you saw, Mr. Cogburn.

MR. COGBURN: Yes sir. Well, Deputy Marshal Potter and me rode on down to Spotted-Gourd’s place, with the wagon to come on behind us. Deputy Marshal Schmidt stayed with the wagon. When we got to the place we found everything as the boy Will had represented. The woman was out in the yard dead with blowflies on her head and the old man was inside with his breast blowed open by a scatter-gun and his feet burned. He was still alive but he just was. Wind was whistling in and out of the bloody hole. He said about four o’clock that morning them two Wharton boys had rode up there drunk—

MR. GOUDY: An objection.

MR. BABLOW: This is a dying declaration, your honor.

JUDGE PARKER: Overruled. Proceed, Mr. Cogburn.

MR. COGBURN: He said them two Wharton boys, Odus and C. C. by name, had rode up there drunk and throwed down on him with a double barrel shotgun and said, “Tell us where your money is, old man.” He would not tell them and they lit some pine knots and held them to his feet and he told them it was in a fruit jar under a gray rock at one corner of the smokehouse. Said he had over four hundred dollars in banknotes in it. Said his wife was crying and taking on all this time and begging for mercy. Said she took off out the door and Odus run to the door and shot her. Said when he raised up off the floor where he was laying Odus turned and shot him. Then they left.

MR. BARLOW: What happened next?

MR. COGBURN: He died on us. Passed away in considerable pain.

MR. BARLOW: Mr. Spotted-Gourd, that is.

MR. COGBURN: Yes sir.

MR. BABLOW: What did you and Marshal Potter do then?

MR. COGBURN: We went out to the smokehouse and that rock had been moved and that jar was gone.

MR. GOUDY: An objection.

JUDGE PARKER: The witness will keep his speculations to himself.

MR. BABLOW: You found a flat gray rock at the corner of the smokehouse with a hollowed-out space under it?

MR. GOUDY: If the prosecutor is going to give evidence I suggest that he be sworn.

JUDGE PARKER: Mr. Barlow, that is not proper examination.

MR. BARLOW: I am sorry, your honor. Marshal Cogburn, what did you find, if anything, at the corner of the smokehouse?

MR. COGBURN: We found a gray rock with a hole right by it.

MR. BARLOW: What was in the hole?

MR. COGBURN: Nothing. No jar or nothing.

MR. BARLOW: What did you do next?

MR. COGBURN: We waited on the wagon to come. When it got there we had a talk amongst ourselves as to who would ride after the Whartons. Potter and me had had dealings with them boys before so we went. It was about a two-hour ride up near where the North Fork strikes the Canadian, on a branch that turns into the Canadian. We got there not long before sundown.

MR. BARLOW: And what did you find?

MR. COGBURN: I had my glass and we spotted the two boys and their old daddy, Aaron Wharton by name, standing down there on the creek bank with some hogs, five or six hogs. They had killed a shoat and was butchering it. It was swinging from a limb and they had built a fire under a wash pot for scalding water. We tied up our horses about a quarter of a mile down the creek and slipped along on foot through the brush so we could get the drop on them. When we showed I told the old man, Aaron Wharton, that we was U. S. marshals and we needed to talk to his boys. He picked up a ax and commenced to cussing us and blackguarding this court.

MR. BARLOW: What did you do?

MR. COGBURN: I started backing away from the ax and tried to talk some sense to him. While this was going on C. C. Wharton edged over by the wash pot behind that steam and picked up a shotgun that was laying up against a saw-log. Potter seen him but it was too late. Before he could get off a shot C. C. Wharton pulled down on him with one barrel and then turned to do the same for me with the other barrel. I shot him and when the old man swung the ax I shot him. Odus lit out for the creek and I shot him. Aaron Wharton and C. C. Wharton was dead when they hit the ground. Odus Wharton was just winged.

MR. BARLOW: Then what happened?

MR. COGBURN: Well, it was all over. I dragged Odus Wharton over to a blackjack tree and cuffed his arms and legs around it with him setting down. I tended to Potter’s wound with my handkerchief as best I could. He was in a bad way. I went up to the shack and Aaron Wharton’s squaw was there but she would not talk. I searched the premises and found a quart jar under some stove wood that had banknotes in it to the tune of four hundred and twenty dollars.

MR. BARLOW: What happened to Marshal Potter?

MR. COGBURN: He died in this city six days later of septic fever. Leaves a wife and six babies.

MR. GOUDY: An objection.

JUDGE PARKER: Strike the comment.

MR. BARLOW: What became of Odus Wharton?

MR. COGBURN: There he sets.

MR. BARLOW: You may ask, Mr. Goudy.

MR. GOUDY: Thank you, Mr. Barlow. How long did you say you have been a deputy marshal, Mr. Cogburn.?

MR. COGBURN: Going on four years.

MR. GOUDY: How many men have you shot in that time?

MR. BARLOW: An objection.

MR. GOUDY: There is more to this shooting than meets the eye, your honor. I am trying to establish the bias of the witness.

JUDGE PARKER: The objection is overruled.

MR. GOUDY: How many, Mr. Cogburn?

MR. COGBURN: I never shot nobody I didn’t have to.

MR. GOUDY: That was not the question. How many?

MR. COGBURN: Shot or killed?

MR. GOUDY: Let us restrict it to “killed” so that we may have a manageable figure. How many people have you killed since you became a marshal for this court?

MR. COGBURN: Around twelve or fifteen, stopping men in flight and defending myself.

MR. GOUDY: Around twelve or fifteen. So many that you cannot keep a precise count. Remember that you are under oath. I have examined the records and a more accurate figure is readily available. Come now, how many?

MR. COGBURN: I believe them two Whartons made twenty-three.

MR. GOUDY: I felt sure it would come to you with a little effort. Now let us see. Twenty-three dead men in four years. That comes to about six men a year.

MR. COGBURN: It is dangerous work.

MR. GOUDY: So it would seem. And yet how much more dangerous for those luckless individuals who find themselves being arrested by you. How many members of this one family, the Wharton family, have you killed?

MR. BARLOW: Your honor, I think counsel should be advised that the marshal is not the defendant in this action.

MR. GOUDY: Your honor, my client and his deceased father and brother were provoked into a gun battle by this man Cogburn. Last spring he shot and killed Aaron Wharton’s oldest son and on November second he fairly leaped at the chance to massacre the rest of the family. I will prove that. This assassin Cogburn has too long been clothed with the authority of an honorable court. The only way I can prove my client’s innocence is by bringing out the facts of these two related shootings, together with a searching review of Cogburn’s methods. All the other principals, including Marshal Potter, are conveniently dead—

JUDGE PARKER: That will do, Mr. Goudy. Restrain yourself. We shall hear your argument later. The defense will be given every latitude. I do not think the indiscriminate use of such words as “massacre” and “assassin” will bring us any nearer the truth. Pray continue with your cross-examination.

MR. GOUDY: Thank you, your honor. Mr. Cogburn, did you know the late Dub Wharton, brother to the defendant, Odus Wharton?

MR. COGBURN: I had to shoot him in self-defense last April in the Going Snake District of the Cherokee Nation.

MR. GOUDY: How did that come about?

MR. COGBURN: I was trying to serve a warrant on him for selling ardent spirits to the Cherokees. It was not the first one. He come at me with a kingbolt and said, “Rooster, I am going to punch that other eye out.” I defended myself.

MR. GOUDY: He was armed with nothing more than a kingbolt from a wagon tongue?

MR. COGBURN: I didn’t know what else he had. I saw he had that. I have seen men badly tore up with things no bigger than a kingbolt.

MR. GOUDY: Were you yourself armed?

MR. COGBURN: Yes sir. I had a hand gun.

MR. GOUDY: What kind of hand gun?

MR. COGBURN: A forty-four forty Colt’s revolver.

MR. GOUDY: Is it not true that you walked in upon him in the dead of night with that revolver in your hand and gave him no warning?

MR. COGBURN: I had pulled it, yes sir.

MR. GOUDY: Was the weapon loaded and cocked?

MR. COGBURN: Yes sir.

MR. GOUDY: Were you holding it behind you or in any way concealing it?

MR. COGBURN: No sir.

MR. GOUDY: Are you saying that Dub Wharton advanced into the muzzle of that cocked revolver with nothing more than a small piece of iron in his hand?

MR. COGBURN: That was the way of it.

MR. GOUDY: It is passing strange. Now, is it not true that on November second you appeared before Aaron Wharton and his two sons in a similar menacing manner, which is to say, you sprang upon them from cover with that same deadly six-shot revolver in your hand?

MR. COGBURN: I always try to be ready.

MR. GOUDY: The gun was pulled and ready in your hand?

MR. COGBURN: Yes sir.

MR. GOUDY: Loaded and cocked?

MR. COGBURN: If it ain’t loaded and cocked it will not shoot.

MR. GOUDY: Just answer my questions if you please.

MR. COGBURN: That one does not make any sense.

JUDGE PARKER: Do not bandy words with counsel, Mr. Cogburn.

MR. COGBURN: Yes sir.

MR. GOUDY: Mr. Cogburn, I now direct your attention back to that scene on the creek bank. It is near dusk. Mr. Aaron Wharton and his two surviving sons are going about their lawful business, secure on their own property. They are butchering a hog so that they might have a little meat for their table—

MR. COGBURN: Them was stolen hogs. That farm belongs to the Wharton squaw, Minnie Wharton.

MR. GOUDY: Your honor, will you instruct this witness to keep silent until he is asked a question?

JUDGE PARKER: Yes, and I will instruct you to start asking questions so that he may respond with answers.

MR. GOUDY: I am sorry, your honor. All right. Mr. Wharton and his sons are on the creek bank. Suddenly, out of the brake, spring two men with revolvers at the ready—

MR. BARLOW: An objection.

JUDGE PARKER: The objection has merit. Mr. Goudy, I have been extremely indulgent. I am going to permit you to continue this line of questioning but I must insist that the cross-examination take the form of questions and answers instead of dramatic soliloquies. And I will caution you that this had best lead to something substantial and fairly soon.

MR. GOUDY: Thank you, your honor. If the court will bear with me for a time. My client has expressed fears about the severity of this court but I have reassured him that no man in this noble Republic loves truth and justice and mercy more than Judge Isaac Parker—

JUDGE PARKER: You are out of order, Mr. Goudy.

MR. GOUDY: Yes sir. All right. Now. Mr. Cogburn, when you and Marshal Potter sprang from the brush, what was Aaron Wharton’s reaction on seeing you?

MR. COGBURN: He picked up a ax and commenced to cussing us.

MR. GOUDY: An instinctive reflex against a sudden danger. Was that the nature of the move?

MR. COGBURN: I don’t know what that means.

MR. GOUDY: You would not have made such a move yourself?

MR. COGBURN: If it was me and Potter with the drop I would have done what I was told.

MR. GOUDY: Yes, exactly, you and Potter. We can agree that the Whartons were in peril of their lives. All right. Let us go back to yet an earlier scene, at the Spotted-Gourd home, around the wagon. Who was in charge of that wagon?

MR. COGBURN: Deputy Marshal Schmidt.

MR. GOUDY: He did not want you to go to the Wharton place, did he?

MR. COGBURN: We talked about it some and he agreed Potter and me should go.

MR. GOUDY: But at first he did not want you to go, did he, knowing there was bad blood between you and the Whartons?

MR. COGBURN: He must have wanted me to go or he would not have sent me.

MR. GOUDY: You had to persuade him, did you not?

MR. COGBURN: I knowed the Whartons and I was afraid somebody would get killed going up against them.

MR. GOUDY: As it turned out, how many were killed?

MR. COGBURN: Three. But the Whartons did not get away. It could have been worse.

MR. GOUDY: Yes, you might have been killed yourself.

MR. COGBURN: You mistake my meaning. Three murdering thieves might have got loose and gone to kill somebody else. But you are right that I might have been killed myself. It was mighty close at that and it is no light matter to me.

MR. GOUDY: Nor to me. You are truly one of nature’s survivors, Mr. Cogburn, and I do not make light of your gift. I believe you testified that you backed away from Aaron Wharton.

MR. COGBURN: That is right.

MR. GOUDY: You were backing away?

MR. COGBURN: Yes sir. He had that ax raised.

MR. GOUDY: Which direction were you going?

MR. COGBURN: I always go backwards when I am backing up.

MR. GOUDY: I appreciate the humor of that remark. Aaron Wharton was standing by the wash pot when you arrived?

MR. COGBURN: It was more like squatting. He was stoking up the fire under the pot.

MR. GOUDY: And where was the ax?

MR. COGBUBN: Right there at his hand.

MR. GOUDY: Now you say you had a cocked revolver clearly visible in your hand and yet he picked up that ax and advanced upon you, somewhat in the manner of Dub Wharton with that nail or rolled-up paper or whatever it was in his hand?

MR. COGBURN: Yes sir. Commenced to cussing and laying about with threats.

MR. GOUDY: And you were backing away? You were moving away from the direction of the wash pot?

MR. COGBURN: Yes sir.

MR. GOUDY: How far did you back up before the shooting started?

MR. COGBURN: About seven or eight steps.

MR. GOUDY: Meaning Aaron Wharton advanced on you about the same distance, some seven or eight steps?

MR. COGBURN: Something like that.

MR. GOUDY: What would that be? About sixteen feet?

MR. COGBURN: Something like that.

MR. GOUDY: Will you explain to the jury why his body was found immediately by the wash pot with one arm in the fire, his sleeve and hand smoldering?

MR. COGBURN: I don’t think that is where he was.

MR. GOUDY: Did you move the body after you had shot him?

MR. COGBURN: No sir.

MR. GOUDY: You did not drag his body back to the fire?

MR. COGBURN: No sir. I don’t think that is where he was.

MR. GOUDY: Two witnesses who arrived on the scene moments after the shooting will testify to the location of the body. You don’t remember moving the body?

MR. COGBUBN: If that is where he was I might have moved him. I don’t remember it.

MR. GOUDY: Why did you place the upper part of his body in the fire?

MR. COGBURN: Well, I didn’t do it.

MR. GOUDY: Then you did not move him and he was not advancing upon you at all. Or you did move him and throw his body in the flames. Which? Make up your mind.

MR. COGBURN: Them hogs that was rooting around there might have moved him.

MR. GOUDY: Hogs indeed.

JUDGE PARKER: Mr. Goudy, darkness is upon us. Do you think you can finish with this witness in the next few minutes?

MR. GOUDY: I will need more time, your honor.

JUDGE PARKER: Very well. You may resume at eight-thirty o’clock tomorrow morning. Mr. Cogburn, you will return to the witness stand at that time. The jury will not talk to others or converse amongst themselves about this case. The defendant is remanded to custody.

The judge rapped his gavel and I jumped, not looking for that noise. The crowd broke up to leave. I had not been able to get a good look at that Odus Wharton but now I did when he stood up with an officer on each side of him. Even though he had one arm in a sling they kept his wrists cuffed in court. That was how dangerous he was. If there ever was a man with black murder in his countenance it was Odus Wharton. He was a half-breed with eyes that were mean and close-set and that stayed open all the time like snake eyes. It was a face hardened in sin. Creeks are good Indians, they say, but a Creek-white like him or a Creek-Negro is something else again.

When the officers were taking Wharton out he passed by Rooster Cogburn and said something to him, some ugly insult or threat, you could tell. Rooster just looked at him. The people pushed me on through the door and outside. I waited on the porch.

Rooster was one of the last ones out. He had a paper in one hand and a sack of tobacco in the other and he was trying to roll a cigarette. His hands were shaking and he was spilling tobacco.

I approached him and said, “Mr. Rooster Cogburn?”

He said, “What is it?” His mind was on something else.

I said, “I would like to talk with you a minute.”

He looked me over. “What is it?” he said.

I said, “They tell me you are a man with true grit.”

He said, “What do you want, girl? Speak up. It is suppertime.”

I said, “Let me show you how to do that.” I took the half-made cigarette and shaped it up and licked it and sealed it and twisted the ends and gave it back to him. It was pretty loose because he had already wrinkled the paper. He lit it and it flamed up and burned about halfway down.

I said, “Your makings are too dry.”

He studied it and said, “Something.”

I said, “I am looking for the man who shot and killed my father, Frank Ross, in front of the Monarch boardinghouse. The man’s name is Tom Chaney. They say he is over in the Indian Territory and I need somebody to go after him.”

He said, “What is your name, girl? Where do you live?”

“My name is Mattie Ross,” I replied. “We are located in Yell County near Dardanelle. My mother is at home looking after my sister Victoria and my brother Little Frank.”

“You had best go home to them,” said he. “They will need some help with the churning.”

I said, “The high sheriff and a man in the marshal’s office have given me the full particulars. You can get a fugitive warrant for Tom Chaney and go after him. The Government will pay you two dollars for bringing him in plus ten cents a mile for each of you. On top of that I will pay you a fifty-dollar reward.”

“You have looked into this a right smart,” said he.

“Yes, I have,” said I. “I mean business.”

He said, “What have you got there in your poke?”

I opened the sugar sack and showed him.

“By God!” said he. “A Colt’s dragoon! Why, you are no bigger than a corn nubbin! What are you doing with that pistol?”

I said, “It belonged to my father. I intend to kill Tom Chaney with it if the law fails to do so.”

“Well, that piece will do the job. If you can find a high stump to rest it on while you take aim and shoot.”

“Nobody here knew my father and I am afraid nothing much is going to be done about Chaney except I do it myself. My brother is a child and my mother’s people are in Monterey, California. My Grandfather Ross is not able to ride.”

“I don’t believe you have fifty dollars.”

“I will have it in a day or two. Have you heard of a robber called Lucky Ned Pepper?”

“I know him well. I shot him in the lip last August down in the Winding Stair Mountains. He was plenty lucky that day.”

“They think Tom Chaney has tied up with him.”

“I don’t believe you have fifty dollars, baby sister, but if you are hungry I will give you supper and we will talk it over and make medicine. How does that suit you?”

I said it suited me right down to ground. I figured he would live in a house with his family and was not prepared to discover that he had only a small room in the back of a Chinese grocery store on a dark street. He did not have a wife. The Chinaman was called Lee. He had a supper ready of boiled potatoes and stew meat. The three of us ate at a low table with a coal-oil lamp in the middle of it. There was a blanket for a tablecloth. A little bell rang once and Lee went up front through a curtain to wait on a customer.

Rooster said he had heard about the shooting of my father but did not know the details. I told him. I noticed by the lamplight that his bad left eye was not completely shut. A little crescent of white showed at the bottom and glistened in the light. He ate with a spoon in one hand and a wadded-up piece of white bread in the other, with considerable sopping. What a contrast to the Chinaman with his delicate chopsticks! I had never seen them in use before. Such nimble fingers! When the coffee had boiled Lee got the pot off the stove and started to pour. I put my hand over my cup.

“I do not drink coffee, thank you.”

Rooster said, “What do you drink?”

“I am partial to cold buttermilk when I can get it.”

“Well, we don’t have none,” said he. “Nor lemonade either.”

“Do you have any sweet milk?”

Lee went up front to his icebox and brought back a jar of milk. The cream had been skimmed from it.

I said, “This tastes like blue-john to me.”

Rooster took my cup and put it on the floor and a fat brindle cat appeared out of the darkness where the bunks were and came over to lap up the milk. Rooster said, “The General is not so hard to please.” The cat’s name was General Sterling Price. Lee served some honey cakes for dessert and Rooster spread butter and preserves all over his like a small child. He had a “sweet tooth.”

I offered to clean things up and they took me at my word. The pump and the washstand were outside. The cat followed me out for the scraps. I did the best I could on the enamelware plates with a rag and yellow soap and cold water. When I got back inside Rooster and Lee were playing cards on the table.

Rooster said, “Let me have my cup.” I gave it to him and he poured some whiskey in it from a demi-john. Lee smoked a long pipe.

I said, “What about my proposition?”

Rooster said, “I am thinking on it.”

“What is that you are playing?”

“Seven-up. Do you want a hand?”

“I don’t know how to play it. I know how to play bid whist.”

“We don’t play bid whist.”

I said, “It sounds like a mighty easy way to make fifty dollars to me. You would just be doing your job anyway, and getting extra pay besides.”

“Don’t crowd me,” said he. “I am thinking about expenses.”

I watched them and kept quiet except for blowing my nose now and again. After a time I said, “I don’t see how you can play cards and drink whiskey and think about this detective business all at the same time.”

He said, “If I’m going up against Ned Pepper I will need a hundred dollars. I have figured out that much. I will want fifty dollars in advance.”

“You are trying to take advantage of me.”

“I am giving you my children’s rate,” he said. “It will not be a easy job of work, smoking Ned out. He will be holed up down there in the hills in the Choctaw Nation. There will be expenses.”

“I hope you don’t think I am going to keep you in whiskey.”

“I don’t have to buy that, I confiscate it. You might try a little touch of it for your cold.”

“No, thank you.”

“This is the real article. It is double-rectified bust-head from Madison County, aged in the keg. A little spoonful would do you a power of good.”

“I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Well, a hundred dollars is my price, sis. There it is.”

“For that kind of money I would want a guarantee. I would want to be pretty sure of what I was getting.”

“I have not yet seen the color of your money.”

“I will have the money in a day or two. I will think about your proposition and talk to you again. Now I want to go to the Monarch boardinghouse. You had better walk over there with me.”

“Are you scared of the dark?”

“I never was scared of the dark.”

“If I had a big horse pistol like yours I would not be scared of any booger-man.”

“I am not scared of the booger-man. I don’t know the way over there.”

“You are a lot of trouble. Wait until I finish this hand. You cannot tell what a Chinaman is thinking. That is how they beat you at cards.”

They were betting money on the play and Rooster was not winning. I kept after him but he would only say, “One more hand,” and pretty soon I was asleep with my head on the table. Some time later he began to shake me.

“Wake up,” he was saying. “Wake up, baby sister.”

“What is it?” said I.

He was drunk and he was fooling around with Papa’s pistol. He pointed out something on the floor over by the curtain that opened into the store. I looked and it was a big long barn rat. He sat there hunkered on the floor, his tail flat, and he was eating meal that was spilling out of a hole in the sack. I gave a start but Rooster put his tobacco-smelling hand over my mouth and gripped my cheeks and held me down.

He said, “Be right still.” I looked around for Lee and figured he must have gone to bed. Rooster said, “I will try this the new way. Now watch.” He leaned forward and spoke at the rat in a low voice, saying, “I have a writ here that says for you to stop eating Chen Lee’s corn meal forthwith. It is a rat writ. It is a writ for a rat and this is lawful service of said writ.” Then he looked over at me and said, “Has he stopped?” I gave no reply. I have never wasted any time encouraging drunkards or show-offs. He said, “It don’t look like to me he has stopped.” He was holding Papa’s revolver down at his left side and he fired twice without aiming. The noise filled up that little room and made the curtains jump. My ears rang. There was a good deal of smoke.

Lee sat up in his bunk and said, “Outside is place for shooting.”

“I was serving some papers,” said Rooster.

The rat was a mess. I went over and picked him up by the tail and pitched him out the back door for Sterling, who should have smelled him out and dispatched him in the first place.

I said to Rooster, “Don’t be shooting that pistol again. I don’t have any more loads for it.”

He said, “You would not know how to load it if you did have.”

“I know how to load it.”

He went to his bunk and pulled out a tin box that was underneath and brought it to the table. The box was full of oily rags and loose cartridges and odd bits of leather and string. He brought out some lead balls and little copper percussion caps and a tin of powder.

He said, “All right, let me see you do it. There is powder, caps and bullets.”

“I don’t want to right now. I am sleepy and I want to go to my quarters at the Monarch boardinghouse.”

“Well, I didn’t think you could,” said he.

He commenced to reload the two chambers. He dropped things and got them all askew and did not do a good job. When he had finished he said, “This piece is too big and clumsy for you. You are better off with something that uses cartridges.”

He poked around in the bottom of the box and came up with a funny little pistol with several barrels. “Now this is what you need,” he said. “It is a twenty-two pepper-box that shoots five times, and sometimes all at once. It is called ‘The Ladies’ Companion.” There is a sporting lady called Big Faye in this city who was shot twice with it by her stepsister. Big Faye dresses out at about two hundred and ninety pounds. The bullets could not make it through to any vitals. That was unusual. It will give you good service against ordinary people. It is like new. I will trade you even for this old piece.”

I said, “No, that was Papa’s gun. I am ready to go. Do you hear me?” I took my revolver from him and put it back in the sack. He poured some more whiskey in his cup.

“You can’t serve papers on a rat, baby sister.”

“I never said you could.”

“These shitepoke lawyers think you can but you can’t. All you can do with a rat is kill him or let him be. They don’t care nothing about papers. What is your thinking on it?”

“Are you going to drink all that?”

“Judge Parker knows. He is a old carpetbagger but he knows his rats. We had a good court here till the pettifogging lawyers moved in on it. You might think Polk Goudy is a fine gentleman to look at his clothes, but he is the sorriest son of a bitch that God ever let breathe. I know him well. Now they have got the judge down on me, and the marshal too. The rat-catcher is too hard on the rats. That is what they say. Let up on them rats! Give them rats a fair show! What kind of show did they give Columbus Potter? Tell me that. A finer man never lived.”

I got up and walked out thinking I would shame him into coming along and seeing that I got home all right but he did not follow. He was still talking when I left. The town was quite dark at that end and I walked fast and saw not a soul although I heard music and voices and saw lights up toward the river where the barrooms were.

When I reached Garrison Avenue I stopped and got my bearings. I have always had a good head for directions. It did not take me long to reach the Monarch. The house was dark. I went around to the back door with the idea that it would be unlocked because of the toilet traffic. I was right. Since I had not yet paid for another day it occurred to me that Mrs. Floyd might have installed a new guest in Grandma Turner’s bed, perhaps some teamster or railroad detective. I was much relieved to find my side of the bed vacant. I got the extra blankets and arranged them as I had done the night before. I said my prayers and it was some time before I got any sleep. I had a cough.

Chapter 4

I WAS SICK the next day. I got up and went to breakfast but I could not eat much and my eyes and nose were running so I went back to bed. I felt very low. Mrs. Floyd wrapped a rag around my neck that was soaked in turpentine and smeared with lard. She dosed me with something called Dr. Underwood’s Bile Activator. “You will pass blue water for a day or two but do not be alarmed as that is only the medicine working,” she said. “It will relax you wonderfully. Grandma Turner and I bless the day we discovered it.” The label on the bottle said it did not contain mercury and was commended by physicians and clergymen.

Along with the startling color effect the potion also caused me to be giddy and lightheaded. I suspect now that it made use of some such ingredient as codeine or laudanum. I can remember when half the old ladies in the country were “dopeheads.”

Thank God for the Harrison Narcotics Law. Also the Volstead Act. I know Governor Smith is “wet” but that is because of his race and religion and he is not personally accountable for that. I think his first loyalty is to his country and not to “the infallible Pope of Rome.” I am not afraid of Al Smith for a minute. He is a good Democrat and when he is elected I believe he will do the right thing if he is not hamstrung by the Republican gang and bullied into an early grave as was done to Woodrow Wilson, the greatest Presbyterian gentleman of the age.

I stayed in bed for two days. Mrs. Floyd was kind and brought my meals to me. The room was so cold that she did not linger to ask many questions. She inquired twice daily at the post office for my letter.

Grandma Turner got in the bed each afternoon for her rest and I would read to her. She loved her medicine and would drink it from a water glass. I read her about the Wharton trial in the New Era and the Elevator. I also read a little book someone had left on the table called Bess Calloway’s Disappointment. It was about a girl in England who could not make up her mind whether to marry a rich man with a pack of dogs named Alec or a preacher. She was a pretty girl in easy circumstances who did not have to cook or work at anything and she could have either one she wanted. She made trouble for herself because she would never say what she meant but only blush and talk around it. She kept everybody in a stir wondering what she was driving at. That was what held your interest. Grandma Turner and I both enjoyed it. I had to read the humorous parts twice. Bess married one of the two beaus and he turned out to be mean and thoughtless. I forget which one it was.

On the evening of the second day I felt a little better and I got up and went to supper. The drummer was gone with his midget calculators and there were four or five other vacancies at the table as well.

Toward the end of the meal a stranger came in wearing two revolvers and made known that he was seeking room and board. He was a nice-looking man around thirty years of age with a “cowlick” at the crown of his head. He needed a bath and a shave but you could tell that was not his usual condition. He looked to be a man of good family. He had pale-blue eyes and auburn hair. He was wearing a long corduroy coat. His manner was stuck-up and he had a smug grin that made you nervous when he turned it on you.

He forgot to take off his spurs before sitting down at the table and Mrs. Floyd chided him, saying she did not want her chair legs scratched up any more than they were, which was considerable. He apologized and complied with her wish. The spurs were the Mexican kind with big rowels. He put them up on the table by his plate. Then he remembered his revolvers and he unbuckled the gun belt and hung it on the back of his chair. This was a fancy rig. The belt was thick and wide and bedecked with cartridges and the handles on his pistols were white. It was like something you might see today in a “Wild West” show.

His grin and his confident manner cowed everybody at the table but me and they stopped talking and made a to-do about passing him things, like he was somebody. I must own too that he made me worry a little about my straggly hair and red nose.

While he was helping himself to the food he grinned at me across the table and said, “Hidy.”

I nodded and said nothing.

“What is your name?” said he.

“Pudding and tame,” said I.

He said, “I will take a guess and say it is Mattie Ross.”

“How do you know that?”

“My name is LaBoeuf,” he said. He called it LaBeef but spelled it something like LaBoeuf. “I saw your mother just two days ago. She is worried about you.”

“What was your business with her, Mr. LaBoeuf?”

“I will disclose that after I eat. I would like to have a confidential conversation with you.”

“Is she all right? Is anything wrong?”

“No, she is fine. There is nothing wrong. I am looking for someone. We will talk about it after supper. I am very hungry.”

Mrs. Floyd said, “If it is something touching on her father’s death we know all about that. He was murdered in front of this very house. There is still blood on my porch where they carried his body.”

The man LaBoeuf said, “It is about something else.”

Mrs. Floyd described the shooting again and tried to draw him out on his business but he only smiled and went on eating and would not be drawn.

After supper we went to the parlor, to a corner away from the other borders, and LaBoeuf set up two chairs there facing the wall. When we were seated in this curious arrangement he took a small photograph from his corduroy coat and showed it to me. The picture was wrinkled and dim. I studied it. The face of the man was younger and there was no black mark but there was no question but it was the likeness of Tom Chaney. I told LaBoeuf as much.

He said, ‘Your mother has also identified him. Now I will give you some news. His real name is Theron Chelmsford. He shot and killed a state senator named Bibbs down in Waco, Texas, and I have been on his trail the best part of four months. He dallied in Monroe, Louisiana, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas, before turning up at your father’s place.”

I said, “Why did you not catch him in Monroe, Louisiana, or Pine Bluff, Arkansas?”

“He is a crafty one.”

“I thought him slow-witted myself.”

“That was his act.”

“It was a good one. Are you some kind of law?”

LaBoeuf showed me a letter that identified him as a Sergeant of Texas Rangers, working out of a place called Ysleta near El Paso. He said, “I am on detached service just now. I am working for the family of Senator Bibbs in Waco.”

“How came Chaney to shoot a senator?”

“It was about a dog. Chelmsford shot the senator’s bird dog. Bibbs threatened to whip him over it and Chelmsford shot the old gentleman while he was sitting in a porch swing.”

“Why did he shoot the dog?”

“I don’t know that. Just meanness. Chelmsford is a hard case. He claims the dog barked at him. I don’t know if he did or not.”

“I am looking for him too,” said I, “this man you call Chelmsford.”

“Yes, that is my understanding. I had a conversation with the sheriff today. He informed me that you were staying here and looking for a special detective to go after Chelmsford in the Indian Territory.”

“I have found a man for the job.”

“Who is the man?”

“His name is Cogburn. He is a deputy marshal for the Federal Court. He is the toughest one they have and he is familiar with a band of robbers led by Lucky Ned Pepper. They believe Chaney has tied up with that crowd.”

“Yes, that is the thing to do,” said LaBoeuf. “You need a Federal man. I am thinking along those lines myself. I need someone who knows the ground and can make an arrest out there that will stand up. You cannot tell what the courts will do these days. I might get Chelmsford all the way down to McLennan County, Texas, only to have some corrupt judge say he was kidnaped and turn him loose. Wouldn’t that be something?”

“It would be a letdown.”

“Maybe I will throw in with you and your marshal.”

“You will have to talk to Rooster Cogburn about that.”

“It will be to our mutual advantage. He knows the land and I know Chelmsford. It is at least a two-man job to take him alive.”

“Well, it is nothing to me one way or the other except that when we do get Chaney he is not going to Texas, he is coming back to Fort Smith and hang.”

“Haw haw,” said LaBoeuf. “It is not important where he hangs, is it?”

“It is to me. Is it to you?”

“It means a good deal of money to me. Would not a hanging in Texas serve as well as a hanging in Arkansas?”

“No. You said yourself they might turn him loose down there. This judge will do his duty.”

“If they don’t hang him we will shoot him. I can give you my word as a Ranger on that.”

“I want Chaney to pay for killing my father and not some Texas bird dog.”

“It will not be for the dog, it will be for the senator, and your father too. He will be just as dead that way, you see, and pay for all his crimes at once.”

“No, I do not see. That is not the way I look at it.”

“I will have a conversation with the marshal.”

“It’s no use talking to him. He is working for me. He must do as I say.”

“I believe I will have a conversation with him all the same.”

I realized I had made a mistake by opening up to this stranger. I would have been more on my guard had he been ugly instead of nice-looking. Also my mind was soft and not right from being doped by the bile activator.

I said, “You will not have a conversation with him for a few days at any rate.”

“How is that?”

“He has gone to Little Rock.”

“On what business?”

“Marshal business.”

“Then I will have a conversation with him when he returns.”

“You will be wiser to get yourself another marshal. They have aplenty of them. I have already made an arrangement with Rooster Cogburn.”

“I will look into it,” said he. “I think your mother would not approve of your getting mixed up in this kind of enterprise. She thinks you are seeing about a horse. Criminal investigation is sordid and dangerous and is best left in the hands of men who know the work.”

“I suppose that is you. Well, if in four months I could not find Tom Chaney with a mark on his face like banished Cain I would not undertake to advise others how to do it.”

“A saucy manner does not go down with me.”

“I will not be bullied.”

He stood up and said, “Earlier tonight I gave some thought to stealing a kiss from you, though you are very young, and sick and unattractive to boot, but now I am of a mind to give you five or six good licks with my belt.”

“One would be as unpleasant as the other,” I replied. “Put a hand on me and you will answer for it. You are from Texas and ignorant of our ways but the good people of Arkansas do not go easy on men who abuse women and children.”

“The youth of Texas are brought up to be polite and to show respect for their elders.”

“I notice people of that state also gouge their horses with great brutal spurs.”

“You will push that saucy line too far.”

“I have no regard for you.”

He was angered and thus he left me, clanking away in all his Texas trappings.