The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The pursuers meet Matt Bowden for the first time at their campfire beside a "cotton pen where we were going to sleep" (166). This most likely refers to a rudimentary shed that was used to store cotton after picking; elsewhere in Faulkner's fiction such structures are called "cotton houses."

Near one of the pursuers' campsites, Ringo finds a house in which Grumby and his men are hiding. Ringo "thought it was deserted, and then he said it looked too dark, too quiet" (165).

Ab Snopes lives "back in the hills" (159). Bayard describes his house as "just a cabin. I reckon there were a thousand of them just like it about our hills, with the same canted plow lying under a tree and the same bedraggled chickens roosting on the plow and the same gray twilight dissolving onto the gray shingles of the roof" (162).

Grenada is the name of a real Mississippi county and a city within it, located south-southwest of 'Yoknapatawpha.' After being told that Ab Snopes is going northeast, Uncle Buck concludes he's heading toward Grenada.

Ab Snopes' home is located "back in the hills," in particular near a "long red hill" (159); in Yoknapatawpha 'the hills' usually means the countryside east of town, but there's no way to say where this particular 'red' hill is. After turning from the road, Bayard, Ringo and Uncle Buck come to a creek bottom where there is a faint path that leads to this mule pen (160). This pen "was just like the one Ringo and Yance and I had built at home, only smaller and better hidden; I reckon [Ab] had got the idea from ours" (160).

A slough is a narrow, shallow inlet or pond, usually in swampy terrain. This slough is where, after seeing a frozen water mocassin, they find Ab Snopes, where they have to burn "Ringo's stick," where Ringo (legally still a 'slave') whips Ab Snopes (legally a 'white' man), and where Uncle Buck leaves them to return to Jefferson with Ab (171).

This haystack beside the "dim road along the river bottom" is the place where Ringo and Bayard sleep on the last night of their chase of Grumby and his men (178).

Further along on the "old road along the river bottom," at a spot where a house had once stood, Bayard and Ringo come upon an "old Negro man" whom Grumby's gang has lynched and left as a warning to the boys (177).

Bayard compares the way Grumby's body collapses on him after being shot to "the balloon [Granny] saw in St. Louis" (182). (The first flights in hot air balloons took place in France at the end of the 18th century. By 1793 they were in the U.S.)

Like many other characters who have to get away from Yoknapatawpha, Matt Bowden says that he and Bridger are "going to Texas" (181).