True Grit - Charles Portis [26]
“Blast coon hunting! This ain’t no coon hunt, it don’t come in forty miles of being a coon hunt!”
“It is the same idea as a coon hunt. You are just trying to make your work sound harder than it is.”
“Forget coon hunting. I am telling you that where I am going is no place for a shirttail kid.”
“That is what they said about coon hunting. Also Fort Smith. Yet here I am.”
“The first night out you will be taking on and crying for your mama.”
I said, “I have left off crying, and giggling as well. Now make up your mind. I don’t care anything for all this talk. You told me what your price for the job was and I have come up with it. Here is the money. I aim to get Tom Chaney and if you are not game I will find somebody who is game. All I have heard out of you so far is talk. I know you can drink whiskey and I have seen you kill a gray rat. All the rest has been talk. They told me you had grit and that is why I came to you. I am not paying for talk. I can get all the talk I need and more at the Monarch boardinghouse.”
“I ought to slap your face.”
“How do you propose to do it from that hog wallow you are sunk in? I would be ashamed of myself living in this filth. If I smelled as bad as you I would not live in a city, I would go live on top of Magazine Mountain where I would offend no one but rabbits and salamanders.”
He came up out of the bunk and spilt his coffee and sent the cat squalling. He reached for me but I moved quickly out of his grasp and got behind the stove. I picked up a handful of expense sheets from the table and jerked up a stove lid with a lifter. I held them over the flames. “You had best stand back if these papers have any value to you,” said I.
He said, “Put them sheets back on the table.”
I said, “Not until you stand back.”
He moved back a step or two. “That is not far enough,” said I. “Go back to the bed.”
Lee looked in through the curtain. Rooster sat down on the edge of the bed. I put the lid back on the stove and returned the papers to the table.
“Get back to your store,” said Rooster, turning his anger on Lee. “Everything is all right. Sis and me is making medicine.”
I said, “All right, what have you to say? I am in a hurry.”
He said, “I cannot leave town until them fee sheets is done. Done and accepted.”
I sat down at the table and worked over the sheets for better than an hour. There was nothing hard about it, only I had to rub out most of what he had already done. The forms were ruled with places for the entries and figures but Rooster’s handwriting was so large and misguided that it covered the lines and wandered up and down into places where it should not have gone. As a consequence the written entries did not always match up with the money figures.
What he called his “vouchers” were scribbled notes, mostly undated. They ran such as this: “Rations for Cecil $1.25,” and “Important words with Red .65 cts.”
“Red who?” I inquired. “They are not going to pay for this kind of thing.”
“That is Society Red,” said he. “He used to cut crossties for the Katy. Put it down anyway. They might pay a little something on it.”
“When was it? What was it for? How could you pay sixty-five cents for important words?”
“It must have been back in the summer. He ain’t been seen since August when he tipped us on Ned that time.”
“Was that what you paid him for?”
“No, Schmidt paid him off on that. I reckon it was cartridges I give him. I give a lot of cartridges away. I cannot recollect every little transaction.”
“I will date it August fifteenth.”
“We can’t do that. Make it the seventeenth of October. Everything on this bunch has to come after the first of October. They won’t pay behind that. We will date all the old ones ahead a little bit.”
“You said you haven’t seen the man since August.”
“Let us change the name to Pig Satterfield and make the date the seventeenth of October. Pig helps us on timber cases and them clerks is used to seeing his name.”
“His Christian name is Pig?”
“I never heard him called anything else.”
I pressed him for approximate dates and