True Grit part 9
At the beginning of Act III of True Grit, Mattie Ross is all alone. She has hired a bad man to track a bad man, thinking that the rightness of her cause makes up the difference between Tom Chaney and Rooster Cogburn. Mattie’s sense of rightness, or of righteousness, is, in a way, the only thing she has going for her. If she passionately loved her father, she has never shown that. If she is truly religious, she has a funny way of expressing it. It seems to me that she is the sort of person who believes herself to be right because God is on her side, and that God is on her side because she believes it to be so. (And she has money.) And even though she is a Presbyterian, she sees no problem with bringing Old Testament-style “retribution” down upon her enemies. She’s seen men murdered from a sniper’s nest and has seen one man shot in the face and another stabbed through the heart (after having his fingers chopped off), and none of it has affected her. She’s placed her faith in a man who is a killer, a drunk and a cheat, and he has failed her, leaving them both lost in a savage, lawless world. But at no time has she ever doubted the rightness of her course.
True Grit part 8
So, Rooster has planned an ambush at the cabin, and now LaBoeuf, who we’ve been seeing so far as a threat to Mattie’s goal of retribution, returns not as a threat but as a witless buffoon.
True Grit part 7
Mattie and Rooster arrive at The Original Greaser Bob’s cabin, wedged in the notch of a valley to find it already occupied. Rooster puts Mattie to work stopping the cabin’s chimney, to smoke the men out. Rooster tells the men inside that he is with Columbus Potter and five other men.
(In the novel, Columbus Potter was Rooster’s only friend, and Rooster’s decrepit condition could be said to be a reflection of his grief over the loss of his friend.)