Charley Noble, if my eyes and my computer's copy-and-paste serve me, you wrote on 13 Apr 11 - 07:32 AM:

He sold the horse and cart so that he could entice Matilda to stay with him

That's not what Norman Span tells us. He claims that Matilda sold the stuff, probably the afternoon before the night she stole the money. The narrator carried his savings with him at daytime and hid it in his mattress only at night. The woman (who may have slept with him but did not sleep with him) found out about that and shoved away his head to steal the money; the sleepy narrator thought it was a jumbie.

Belafonte, however, did not believe the story about Matilda selling the cart and horse - after all, this would be a risky thing to do, even if she used the cart to go to the next airport and sold it there. Witnesses tend to contradict each other, and the victim is not always to be trusted.