Blowhard, Esq. writes:

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 Forth 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.

…

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 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 the Choctow Nation when snow was on the ground.

— The first and last paragraphs of Charles Portis’s “True Grit”

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