The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The "two officers" mentioned in The Hamlet as accompanying Mink in his courtroom appearances are probably deputy sheriffs, but the novel uses the term "officers" to name them (287, 367).

At Mink Snopes' wedding, these "two passing men" - men who happen to be walking past the office of the Justice of the Peace - are called in to witness the ceremony (264).

When Mink and his wife get married in the area of the convict camp, the local Justice of the Peace "removed his chew of tobacco" before performing the ceremony (264).

The owner of the logging camp where Mink works "lives openly" with a quadroon woman "most of whose teeth were gold" and who superintends the kitchen (262). (The term 'quadroon' appears in a lot of American literature before the Civil Rights movement; it was used to label a person with three white and one black grandparents.)

The father of the woman who marries Mink Snopes is a "roaring man of about fifty"; he's a widower who has a "magnificent quadroon mistress" and the owner of timber land that he harvests using unpaid convict labor that he acquires "through political influence or bribery or whatever" from the state of Mississippi (262).

The foreman at the convict camp gives Mink Snopes a job cutting timber.

Lump tells Mink that an unnamed Negro who was "grabbling" - trying to catch a fish by hand - "found that durn gun," the murder weapon that Mink tried to throw away in the slough (257); Lump also tells Mink that he is planning to Mink that he is planning to "take a few of the boys" and punish the Negro violently for informing the sheriff about his discovery (258), though that part of the story is never told.

Slow and methodical in his pursuit of Mink Snopes, whom he eventually arrests, Sheriff Hampton is "pussel-gutted" and good natured (257). He is a "tremendous man, neckless, in an unbuttoned waistcoat and a collarless starched shirt," possessing a "broad heavy face" with "small, cold, shrewd eyes [that] resembled two bits of black glass pressed into uncooked dough" (282).

When Houston's father dies, this neighbor makes an offer on the Houston family farm - which suggests he is wealthier than most of the small farmers in Frenchman's Bend.

Although The Hamlet refers to this woman as a "landlady," it seems clear that she runs the brothel in Galveston where Jack Houston meets his El Paso "wife"; this "curl-papered landlady" tries to prevent him from taking the woman away from the house (234).