If in four months I could not find Tom Chaney with a mark on his face like banished Cain I would not undertake to advise others how to do it. - Charles Portis

My life is over, for all practical purposes. I no longer have enough money to keep a women.

You do not think much of me, do you, Cogburn?
I don't think about you at all when your mouth is closed.

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 but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. 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 and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.