In the "common room" beside the cell holding Cotton are the men the narrative calls the "minor prisoners" (163). In Faulkner's fiction the men in this holding pen are invariably black; in this case they are described as "a group of negroes from the chain-gang that worked the streets," who have been jailed for vagrancy, selling whiskey and shooting craps (163). One of them is at the window, "yelling down to someone" outside the jail (163), and one talks to Cotton, telling him to "Hush up, white man" when he starts going into detail about Houston's corpse (164).
"Three or four miles" outside the county seat, the men in the Sheriff's car meet "wagons and cars . . . going home from market day in town" (163). The text does not actually mention any people in either kind of vehicle, but it does say that the "Sheriff greets them with a single gesture of his fat arm," and that "them" must be human (163), or at least potential voters.
The narrative briefly describes the townspeople whom Cotton sees while being driven to jail as "children" who are wearing "small bright garments" and playing, and "men and women" heading home at suppertime, "to plates of food and cups of coffee" (163). The detail that the yards in this neighborhood are "big [and] shady" implies that these people are white and at least fairly well-to-do.
"Five men in overalls squatted against the wall of Varner's store" (156) - this is how the narrative describes the group whose conversation about Houston's disappearance makes Cotton increasingly uncomfortable. Their discussion suggests all five live nearby. Their "overalls" and "squatting" posture suggest they are all farmers. But the narrative gives no other details to identify them as a group, and distinguishes them from each other only as "the first," "a second," "a third" and "a fourth" (156-57). Cotton's grudge against Houston is common knowledge among them.
The clerk named Snopes tells Cotton that the man who found his shotgun in the slough where he tried to hide it was "a nigger squirl hunter" (159). There are very few Negroes in the fictions that are set in or around Varner's store, which Faulkner elsewhere calls Frenchman's Bend. All we know about this man is that he found the gun, though we can assume he also took it to Varner's. (See also Unnamed Fish-Grabblers in this index.)
Vernon Tull appears in many Yoknapatawpha fictions as a Frenchman's Bend farmer, but in "The Hound" only his name appears. The Snopes who works in Varner's store says it was Tull who identified the shotgun that was found in the slough as Cotton's.
When Cotton goes inside Varner's store, he talks with "the clerk, whose name was Snopes" (159). There are a great many Snopeses in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. This one may be the most famous of them all: Flem Snopes, whose climb up the social ladder begins, as The Hamlet describes in detail, when he acquires the job at Varner's store. Given the time frame for this story, however, it's more likely to be some other Snopes. (When he rewrote "The Hound" for inclusion in The Hamlet, the clerk is named Lump Snopes.)
This "second deputy" is barely referred to by the story (162). He rides in the front seat of the sheriff's "battered Ford" car with "the driver" (163), a man named Joe. (Joe is presumably the story's 'first' deputy.)
The deputy who drives the sheriff's car back to town after Cotton has been captured is named "Joe" (163). Presumably the same deputy is the one driving the car earlier, when it picks up the sheriff at Varner's store. No other details about him are given.
