True Grit

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 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.

He saw that I had brought to all the darkies’ attention how little he was.

Papa used to say that the only friends we had down here right after the war were the Irish Democrats in New York.

The paper editors are great ones for reaping where they have not sown

They would rather print trash.

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.

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.”

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.