Charles Portis - True Grit

But I never got the chance to visit him. Not three weeks after we had returned from the Winding Stair Mountains, Rooster found himself in trouble over a gun duel he fought in Fort Gibson, Cherokee Nation. He shot and killed Odus Wharton in the duel. Of course Wharton was a convicted murderer and a fugitive from the gallows but there was a stir about the manner of the shooting. Rooster shot two other men that were with Wharton and killed one of them. They must have been trash or they would not have been in the company of the “thug,” but they were not wanted by the law at that time and Rooster was criticized. He had many enemies. Pressure was brought and Rooster made to surrender his Federal badge. We knew nothing of it until it was over and Rooster gone.

He took his cat General Price and the widow Potter and her six children and went to San Antonio, Texas, where he found work as a range detective for a stockmen’s association. He did not marry the woman in Fort Smith and I supposed they waited until they reached “the Alamo City.”

From time to time I got bits of news about him from Chen Lee, who did not hear directly but only by rumor. Twice I wrote the stockmen’s association in San Antonio. The letters were not returned but neither were they answered. When next I heard, Rooster had gone into the cattle business himself in a small way. Then in the early 1890s I learned he had abandoned the Potter woman and her brood and had gone north to Wyoming with a reckless character named Tom Smith where they were hired by stock owners to terrorize thieves and people called nesters and grangers. It was a sorry business, I am told, and I fear Rooster did himself no credit there in what they called the “Johnson County War.”

In late May of 1903 Little Frank sent me a cutting from The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. It was an advertisement for the Cole Younger and Frank James “Wild West” show that was coming to play in the Memphis Chicks’ baseball park. Down in the smaller type at the bottom of the notice Little Frank had circled the following:

HE RODE WITH QUANTRILL!

HE RODE FOR PARKER!

Scourge of Territorial outlaws and Texas cattle thieves for 25 years!

“Rooster” Cogburn will amaze you with his skill and dash with the six-shooter and repeating rifle! Don’t leave the ladies and little ones behind! Spectators can watch this unique exhibition in perfect safety!

So he was coming to Memphis. Little Frank had teased me and chaffed me over the years about Rooster, making out that he was my secret “sweetheart.” By sending this notice he was having sport with me, as he thought. He had penciled a note on the cutting that said, “Skill and dash! It’s not too late, Mattie!” Little Frank loves fun at the other fellow’s expense and the more he thinks it tells on you the better he loves it. We have always liked jokes in our family and I think they are all right in their place. Victoria likes a good joke herself, so far as she can understand one. I have never held it against either one of them for leaving me at home to look after Mama, and they know it, for I have told them.

I rode the train to Memphis by way of Little Rock and had no trouble getting the conductors to honor my Rock Island pass. It belonged to a freight agent and I was holding it against a small loan. I had thought to put up at a hotel instead of paying an immediate call on Little Frank as I did not wish to hear his chaff before I had seen Rooster. I speculated on whether the marshall would recognize me. My thought was: A quarter of a century is a long time!

As things turned out, I did not go to a hotel. When my train reached “the Bluff City” I saw that the show train was on a siding there at the depot. I left my bag in the station and set off walking beside the circus coaches through crowds of horses and Indians and men dressed as cow-boys and soldiers.

I found Cole Younger and Frank James sitting in a Pullman car in their shirtsleeves. They were drinking Coca-Colas and fanning themselves. They were old men. I supposed Rooster must have aged a good deal too. These old-timers had all fought together in the border strife under Quantrill’s black standard, and afterward led dangerous lives, and now this was all they were fit for, to show themselves to the public like strange wild beasts of the jungle.

They claim Younger carried fourteen bullets about in various portions of his flesh. He was a stout, florid man with a pleasant manner and he rose to greet me. The waxy James remained in his seat and did not speak or remove his hat. Younger told me that Rooster had passed away a few days before while the show was at Jonesboro, Arkansas. He had been in failing health for some months, suffering from a disorder he called “night hoss,” and the heat of the early summer had been too much for him. Younger reckoned his age at sixty-eight years. There was no one to claim him and they had buried him in the Confederate cemetery in Memphis, though his home was out of Osceola, Missouri.

Younger spoke fondly of him. “We had some lively times,” was one thing he said. I thanked the courteous old outlaw for his help and said to James, “Keep your seat, trash!” and took my leave. They think now it was Frank James who shot the bank officer in Northfield. As far as I know that scoundrel never spent a night in jail, and there was Cole Younger locked away twenty-five years in the Minnesota pen.

I did not stay for the show as I guessed it would be dusty and silly like all circuses. People grumbled about it when it was over, saying James did nothing more than wave his hat to the crowd, and that Younger did even less, it being a condition of his parole that he not exhibit himself. Little Frank took his two boys to see it and they enjoyed the horses.

I had Rooster’s body removed to Dardanelle on the train. The railroads do not like to carry disinterred bodies in the summertime but I got around paying the premium rate by having my correspondent bank in Memphis work the deed from that end through a grocery wholesaler that did a volume freight business. He was reburied in our family plot. Rooster had a little C.S.A. headstone coming to him but it was so small that I put up another one beside it, a sixty-five-dollar slab of Batesville marble inscribed

REUBEN COGBURN

1835-1903

A RESOLUTE OFFICER OF PARKER’S COURT

People here in Dardanelle and Russellville said, well, she hardly knew the man but it is just like a cranky old maid to do a “stunt” like that. I know what they said even if they would not say it to my face. People love to talk. They love to slander you if you have any substance. They say I love nothing but money and the Presbyterian Church and that is why I never married. They think everybody is dying to get married. It is true that I love my church and my bank. What is wrong with that? I will tell you a secret. Those same people talk mighty nice when they come in to get a crop loan or beg a mortgage extension! I never had the time to get married but it is nobody’s business if I am married or not married. I care nothing for what they say. I would marry an ugly baboon if I wanted to and make him cashier. I never had the time to fool with it. A woman with brains and a frank tongue and one sleeve pinned up and an invalid mother to care for is at some disadvantage, although I will say I could have had two or three old untidy men around here who had their eyes fastened on my bank. No, thank you! It might surprise you to know their names.

I heard nothing more of the Texas officer, LaBoeuf. If he is yet alive and should happen to read these pages, I will be pleased to hear from him. I judge he is in his seventies now, and nearer eighty than seventy. I expect some of the starch has gone out of that “cowlick.” Time just gets away from us. This ends my true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.