Eck Snopes

A "young, well-made, muscle-bound man" (69), Eck becomes the new apprentice at the blacksmith. Unlike his older cousins Flem and I.O., Eck is good-hearted and gullible, possessing an "open equable face beginning less than an inch below the hairline" (69). He is easily manipulated by I. O., paying twenty dollars for Ike's cow (295) and becoming caught up in the wild pony affair without initially suspecting Flem's invisible hand guiding the ruse. His first wife died after the birth of his first son Wallstreet, and he remarried and had two or three more children with his second wife. Eck and Wall are at the center of the early part of the sale of the Texas ponies, but they are unable to catch either of the beasts they supposedly own. (In The Town, Ratliff makes a number of jokes that Eck was "never in this world a Snopes," suggesting that Eck's mother may have conceived Eck by a man who was not a Snopes; there is no textual evidence, however, to support this.)