The Hamlet gives us no clues about where to locate the "military boarding school" that Hoake McCarron attends (151). There is only one such school in Mississippi, an academy in Port Gibson that was established in 1830. We are using that to provide a location, but Faulkner may have been thinking of many other possible schools and places - or of a place like Yoknapatawpha, on a map only he could draw.
Memphis is the closest major city to Yoknapatawpha, and appears in many of the stories and novels. In "Gold Is Not Always," Edmonds plans to notify both the local sheriff and "the Memphis police" to be on the lookout for his missing mule (230).
The metal detector salesman reminds Lucas that he has "come all the way from St. Louis" (228), which may be the headquarters of the company he works for.
Although the narrative never goes inside it, Edmonds reminds Lucas that he has "near three thousand dollars in the bank" (227), and later Lucas sends George Wilkins to that bank to get fifty of those dollars in "silver" (233).
When the salesman returns to the Edmonds place on the story's second day, he is wearing new "khaki pants . . . still showing the creases where they had been folded on the store's shelf" (233). We know the salesman planned to spend the night in "town" (233), so we assume he made this purchase at the Jefferson department store that is mentioned elsewhere in Faulkner's fiction.
On "a hill overlooking the creek" where the treasure seekers had looked the night before is the orchard that Lucas seeds with silver dollars to con the salesman (234). The orchard is beside a ruined house that was big enough to have more than one "chimney," which - along with the presence of an orchard - suggests an ante bellum plantation (234).
As tenant farmers, both Lucas and George Wilkins live in cabins that belong to their landlord, Roth Edmonds. In other stories both these cabins play important roles, though in different ways. In "Gold Is Not Always," however, neither place is visited, or even visible, but there are scenes set at their "gates" (233).
