The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

A horse trader from Texas, Buck has a "broad, quite cold, wind-gnawed face and bleak cold eyes" that become "like two pieces of flint turned suddenly up in dug earth" whenever he looks directly at anyone. Wearing a "densely black moustache," he arrives in Frenchman's Bend with a "savage and recent gash" across "the left side of his head, obliterating the tip of that ear." At his hip, he has a "heavy pearl-handled pistol" over the top of "tight jean pants" into which his "belly fitted neat and smooth as a peg" (300-301).

One of the men who buys a spotted pony from the Texan in Frenchman's Bend.

Eck leaves Wallstreet with his mother when his first wife dies.

I.O. Snopes has a six-month-old child even though he has been living in the hamlet as "a single man" for three years (225). When he sees this child and its mother, I.O. vanishes before the baby's sex can be determined. (In the last two volumes of the Snopes trilogy he is a son named Montgomery Ward Snopes.)

The men who stay at the Savoy Hotel where Mink's wife works are described as horse-traders, jurors and insurance agents who sell to Negroes, a clientele that justifies the place's "equivocal reputation" (288). It is also rumored that some of these men pay her for sex, but that's not made explicit.

He takes care of cleaning and keeping fires lit at the Savoy Hotel, where Mink's wife works while Mink is awaiting trial (288).

Ratliff shares a bed with his oldest nephew while Mink Snopes' family stays at his house in Jefferson. Ratliff "had given up his room to them" (288).

The "committing magistrate" presides over the arraignment of Mink Snopes (287).

The narrator refers to the black prisoners in the Jefferson jail that holds Mink Snopes as "the negro victims of a thousand petty white man's misdemeanors" (285). At night they "eat and sleep together" in the jail's "common room"; during the day they work outside on a chain gang, once a familiar feature of the southern penal system. They are described from Mink's point of view, as "a disorderly clump of heads in battered hats and caps and bodies in battered overalls and broken shoes" (285).