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.

“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.”

I did not wish to discuss the thing with idly curious strangers, no matter how well intentioned they might be.

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

Illinois but a man named Bloodworth

for a colored man named Yarnell Poindexter

Tavern but was not wounded in that “scrap

Ross was the gentlest, most honorable