John L. Sullivan was the last heavyweight American prizefighter to win his championship without wearing gloves ("bare knuckle"). He won the championship by defeating Jake Kilrain at Richburg, Mississippi on August 7, 1889. "Boon and the conductor and the brakeman talked about Lion and Old Ben as people talked about Sullivan and Kilrain or Dempsey and Tunney" (187). The narrator Quentin's comparison elevates the great dog and the great bear to national championship figures.
The "father" of the "Quentin" who narrates this story (almost certainly Quentin Compson) apparently joins the hunt on its last day; he speaks to his son several times, and that son also remembers what his father told him about hunting safety (193), so "father said" - the phrase that haunts Quentin Compson's section of The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929, half a dozen years earlier - also appears often in Quentin's narrative here (193, 195, etc.).
After their father dies, Buck and Buddy McCaslin build this "oneroom log cabin" for themselves, and move "all the slaves" into "the big house" - the "tremendously-conceived" plantation mansion - which Old Carothers McCaslin had built for his family (248). Except when they needed help lifting the logs into place, Buck and Buddy "refuse to allow any slave" to work on their cabin, even as they "add other rooms" to it over the years (248).
