Suratt does not bother going to see the third man who he heard owns goats, because he assumes this man too - whom the narrative calls "the other goat owner" - has already sold his goats to Flem Snopes as well (140).
The "second goat owner" Suratt visits lives four miles further from Varner's store than the "first" one, but he too has already sold his goats to Flem Snopes when Suratt gets to his place (139).
As an itinerant salesman, of sewing machines and anything else that he can swap or sell, Suratt regularly meets and does business with the lower class population of at least three counties, including Yoknapatawpha. The groups he talks with include groups of men "squatting . . . on the porch of a crossroads store," and "women surrounded by laden clotheslines and blackened wash pots" (138).
The Armstids have "four children, all under six years of age, the youngest an infant in arms" (142). One of the other characters refers to them as "them chaps" (138), but this doesn't necessarily mean all four are boys.
One of the many people who gather on the Old Frenchman's place to watch Henry Armstid digging for treasure is distinguished from the group as "the first rider" (137). That is an unusual locution, but may just mean that he was riding by on a mule or mule-drawn wagon - or less likely, on a horse - when he became the first person to stop to watch Armstid. He is chased away by Armstid, and then, presumably, spreads the word about what Armstid is doing.
"For sixty years three generations of sons and grandsons" have snuck onto the abandoned Frenchman's place at night, digging into its dirt in search of "the gold and the silver, the money and the plate" that was reputedly hidden there during the Civil War (136). Nothing has ever been found.
Best known as both the Commander of the Union forces during the late stages of the Civil War and then a two-term President, Ulysses S. Grant rose to the rank of Major General during the fighting in the western theater of the Civil War. The "Vicksburg campaign" that he led in 1863 brought him through the part of Mississippi where Yoknapatawpha is supposed to be (136).
Frenchman's Bend contains very few African Americans - none appear in this story - but the narrator does refer to the slaves who labored on the Frenchman's place before the Civil War as "the progenitors of saxophone players in Harlem honky-tonks" (136). This seems a picturesque way to suggest that most of the descendants of the Frenchman's slaves live in the North.
