"The second" of the four men in the mob outside the jail who speak to Sheriff Hampton on Monday morning. He is wearing either a "felt hat" or a "sweat-stained panama," but is not described, except as one of the "massed duplicates" of the first man, who has "brown farmer's hands" and a "brown weathered face" (137).
"The fourth" of the four men in the mob outside the jail who speak to Sheriff Hampton on Monday morning. He is wearing either a "felt hat" or a "sweat-stained panama," but is not described, except as one of the "massed duplicates" of the first man, who has "brown farmer's hands" and a "brown weathered face" (137).
"The third" of the four men in the mob outside the jail who speak to Sheriff Hampton on Monday morning. He is wearing either a "felt hat" or a "sweat-stained panama," but is not described, except as one of the "massed duplicates" of the first man, who has "brown farmer's hands" and a "brown weathered face" (137).
One of the four men in the mob outside the jail who speak to Sheriff Hampton on Monday morning. This first man is vividly described with "his brown farmer's hands" and "his brown weathered face," "curious divinant and abashless" (137).
Named after a former slave-dealer who was also one of the Confederacy's most effective generals and a founder of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest Gowrie's nickname, "Nub," combines the initials of his first names with the fact of his missing left arm - though how he became handicapped is not explained. He is "a short lean old man with [pale] eyes . . . and a red weathered face"; his voice is "high thin strong [and] uncracked" (156).
Crawford Gowrie, the intruder behind the novel's title, never directly appears in the narrative, but the details of his biography are memorable. Second of Hub Gowrie's six sons, he deserted from the U.S. Army on the day before World War I ended, hid for eighteen months "in a series of caves and tunnels in the hills" of Yoknapatawpha, was captured after a gunfight with authorities, served a year in prison, worked out of Memphis either as a rum-runner or a strike-breaker, then returned to Beat Four, reportedly to "more or less settle down" (161). Those reports are premature.
Vinson, the 28-year-old white man whose murder launches the story, is the youngest of Nub and Amanda Gowrie's six sons. The only one "with an aptitude for trading and for money," he can write checks that the local banks will honor and is "said to own several small parcels" of Yoknapatawpha farmland (162). The business he is engaged in at the time of his death is harvesting timber in partnership with his brother Crawford.
Vardaman Gowrie and his brother Bilbo are identical twins, "identical as two clothing store dummies" (159) or "two clothes pins on a line" (160). The novel consistently treats them identically too. "About thirty, a head taller than their father," their faces are "surly quick-tempered and calm" (160), though they act together with energy in the search for their murdered brother's body. Like his brother, Vardaman is named after a noted Mississippi governor, but together they spend their nights hunting and "their days sleeping flat on the naked planks" of the front porch at home (162).
Bilbo and his brother Vardaman are identical twins, "identical as two clothing store dummies" (159) or "two clothes pins on a line" (160). "About thirty, a head taller than their father," their faces are "surly quick-tempered and calm" (160), though they act together with energy in the search for their murdered brother's body. Like his brother, Bilbo is named after a noted Mississippi governor, but together they spend their nights hunting and "their days sleeping flat on the naked planks" of the front porch at home (162).
