The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The part the drug store clerk plays in in the story is defined by his absence: he goes to dinner, leaving the drug store's proprietor to take his place behind the counter.

This deputy follows up the health officer's report about Old Anse's behavior in the cemetery, and discovers the old man's body.

Although he never appears directly in the story, the county sheriff oversees the assessment and payment of property taxes on the Mardis-Holland property.

The "gorilla," the "thug" whom Granby Dodge "hired . . . down here from Memphis” (31) to murder Judge Dukinfield is “a smallish man in city clothes” (28). He is both unremarkable and unsettling, “with a face like a shaved wax doll, and eyes with a still way of looking and a voice with a still way of talking” (28–29). His appearance and criminal propensities recall aspects of Popeye from Sanctuary.

In "Smoke" the man who owns and runs the Jefferson drugstore is named West. He is instrumental in providing county attorney Gavin Stevens with information concerning the stranger with the taste for "city cigarettes" (28).

Gavin Stevens "was a Harvard graduate: a loose-jointed man with a mop of untidy iron-gray hair, who could discuss Einstein with college professors and who spent whole afternoons among the squatting men against the walls of country stores, talking to them in their idiom. He called these his vacations" (17). One of Faulkner's favorite characters, he plays the role of detective in all six Knight's Gambit stories.