"As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone."

“Now the drummers did not rush out to grab Chaney or shoot him but instead scattered like poultry while Chaney took my father's purse from his warm body and ripped open the trouser band and took the gold pieces too. I cannot say how he knew about them. When he finished his thieving he raced to the end of the street and struck the night watchman at the stock barn a fierce blow to the mouth with his rifle stock, knocking him silly. He put a bridle on Papa's horse Judy and rode out bareback. Darkness swallowed him up. He might have taken the time to saddle the horse or hitched up three spans of mules to a Concord stagecoach and smoked a pipe as it seems no one in that city was after him. He had mistaken the drummers for men.”

“I never seen anybody from Texas I couldn't shade. Get cross-ways of me, LaBoeuf, and you will think a thousand of brick has fell on you. You will wisht you had been at the Alamo with Travis.”

“You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.”

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

“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.”

“Time just gets away from us.”