True Grit - Charles Portis [73]
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 cowboys 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