John Wayne credited as playing...
John Elder
- John Elder: All we want to do is make you end up rich and respectable. You fight us every step of the way.
- Bud Elder: I don't want to be rich and respectable. I want to be just like the rest of you.
- Bud Elder: I'm going with you. I can draw pretty fast. We can be famous -- like the Dalton Brothers!
- John Elder: They're famous -- but they're just a little bit dead. They were hung!
- Tom Elder: Well, time ain't made you any prettier to look at.
- John Elder: Tom! It hasn't helped you any, either.
- Mary Gordon: I hate to break in on your grief, but you'll need some food. Katie asked me to look in on you, if you came to the funeral.
- John Elder: That's mighty nice of you, ma'am.
- Mary Gordon: I wasn't doing it for you, or any of you. I'm doing it because Katie asked me to. She liked that rocker.
- John Elder: She seemed to have confided a great deal in you, Miss Gordon.
- Mary Gordon: If she'd had her sons around her she wouldn't have had to confide in strangers. She told me what fine men you were, never forgetting her, sending her money, helping her send Bud through school. She was so proud. Her tall sons for whom she kept making up lies so she could hide her shame. Blamed Texas for taking her sons. Texas is a woman, she used to say, a big, wild, beautiful woman. You raise a kid to where he's got some size, and there's Texas whispering in his ear and smiling, saying, "Come and have some fun." "It's hard enough to raise children," she'd say. "But when you've got to fight Texas, a mother hasn't a chance." That's why she pushed Bud. She let Texas beat her with the rest of you. She was going to see Bud through college or die. Well, she died.
- Sheriff Billy Wilson: You figuring on trouble?
- John Elder: There's always somebody looking for some. Clearwater's no different than any other town, but that's one thing I don't want, Billy - trouble.
- John Elder: Still haven't got a newspaper around here, huh?
- Sheriff Billy Wilson: No, but we have a gossip about every 20 feet.
- John Elder: Twelve hundred acres of the - best land anywhere. I wonder why she sold.
- Tom Elder: Well, I guess a woman couldn't run a big spread by herself.
- Bud Elder: I ain't going back to college! I'm going with him.
- [looks towards John]
- John Elder: There's just one little thing you're forgetting - you ain't been invited.
- Tom Elder: Oh, I'd take you with me, Bud, but I don't exactly know where I'm goin'. But, I'll tell you one thing, I ain't goin' anyplace where I've already been.
- John Elder: Why can't we get some straight answers? Why didn't you tell us that Bass was shot in the back?
- Sheriff Billy Wilson: When a man is killed, does it make a whole lot of difference which direction the bullet came from?
- Tom Elder: It makes all the difference, if you're trying to find out whether he was murdered or not.
- John Elder: You know what Pa always told us - he wouldn't be caught dead playing Blackjack. Shoot the first one of his kids he saw playing it. Thought it was a woman's game.