Charles Portis

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

a cotton house made over into a little cabin. It had a good roof.

“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.

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.

If Papa had a failing it was his kindly disposition. People would use him. I did not get my mean streak from him.

He did not take the loss like a man but went back to the room at the boardinghouse and sulled up like a possum.

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.

He had mistaken the drummers for men. “The wicked flee when none pursueth.”

What a wastel Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!