True Grit - Charles Portis [46]
“What happened to The Green Frog?”
“I tried to run it myself for a while but I couldn’t keep good help and I never did learn how to buy meat. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was like a man fighting bees. Finally I just give up and sold it for nine hundred dollars and went out to see the country. That was when I went out to the staked plains of Texas and shot buffalo with Vernon Shaftoe and a Flathead Indian called Olly. The Mormons had run Shaftoe out of Great Salt Lake City but don’t ask me about what it was for. Call it a misunderstanding and let it go at that. There is no use in you asking me questions about it, for I will not answer them. Olly and me both taken a solemn oath to keep silent. Well, sir, the big shaggies is about all gone. It is a damned shame. I would give three dollars right now for a pickled buffalo tongue.”
“They never did get you for stealing that money?”
“I didn’t look on it as stealing.”
“That was what it was. It didn’t belong to you.”
“It never troubled me in that way. I sleep like a baby. Have for years.”
“Colonel Stonehill said you were a road agent before you got to be a marshal.”
“I wondered who was spreading that talk. That old gentleman would do better minding his own business.”
“Then it is just talk.”
“It is very little more than that. I found myself one pretty spring day in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in need of a road stake and I robbed one of them little high-interest banks there. Thought I was doing a good service. You can’t rob a thief, can you? I never robbed no citizens. I never taken a man’s watch.”
“It is all stealing,” said I.
“That was the position they taken in New Mexico,” said he. “I had to fly for my life. Three fights in one day. Bo was a strong colt then and there was not a horse in that territory could run him in the ground. But I did not appreciate being chased and shot at like a thief. When the posse had thinned down to about seven men I turned Bo around and taken the reins in my teeth and rode right at them boys firing them two navy sixes I carry on my saddle. I guess they was all married men who loved their families as they scattered and run for home.”
“That is hard to believe.”
“What is?”
“One man riding at seven men like that.”
“It is true enough. We done it in the war. I seen a dozen bold riders stampede a full troop of regular cavalry. You go for a man hard enough and fast enough and he don’t have time to think about how many is with him, he thinks about himself and how he may get clear out of the wrath that is about to set down on him.”
“I think you are ‘stretching the blanket.’ ”
“Well, that was the way of it. Me and Bo walked into Texas, we didn’t run. I might not do it today. I am older and stouter and so is Bo. I lost my money to some quarter-mile horse racers out there in Texas and followed them high-binders across Red River up in the Chickasaw Nation and lost their trail. That was when I tied up with a man named Fogelson who was taking a herd of beef to Kansas. We had a pretty time with them steers. It rained every night and the grass was spongy and rank. It was cloudy by day and the mosquitoes eat us up. Fogelson abused us like a stepfather. We didn’t know what sleep was. When we got to the South Canadian it was all out of the banks but Fogelson had a time contract and he wouldn’t wait. He said, ‘Boys, we are going across.’ We lost near about seventy head getting across and counted ourselves lucky. Lost our wagon too; we done without bread and coffee after that. It was the same story all over again at the North Canadian. ‘Boys, we are going across.’ Some of them steers got bogged in the mud on the other side and I was pulling them free. Bo was about played out and I hollered up for that Hutchens to come help me. He was sitting up there on his horse smoking a pipe. Now, he wasn’t a regular drover. He was from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and he had some interest in the herd. He said, ‘Do it yourself. That’s what you are paid for.’ I pulled down on him right there. It was not the thing to do but I was wore out and hadn’t had no coffee.