This captain seems fairly phlegmatic: when Horace's glass-blowing starts a fire in his cabin on board the ship he commands, at least according to Horace's account, he "decides that I'd better not try it again" until the reach land (138).
Horace returns from France on a ship that sails from Brest, France. When his experiments with glassblowing start a fire in his cabin, the captain asks him to stop until they reach land, "what with all the men on board" (158). This last detail suggests the ship is carrying American troops home, though Horace himself was a noncombatant.
As Byron Snopes drives through "the remembered scenes of his boyhood" in Frenchman's Bend, he notes one change: reflecting the impact of modernity, the "blacksmith shop" is now also "a garage," "with a gasoline pump" (278).
"Mrs. Littlejohn's huge, unpainted boarding house" figures prominently in several other Yoknapatawpha fictions (278). In Flags in the Dust it appears only in passing, as Bryon Snopes drives through Frenchman's Bend on his way out of the county.
At the livery stable where Rafe takes Bayard are a number of "onlookers" (129) sitting "on top of the gate" or "leaning with crossed arms upon it" (126). Presumably they are admiring the stallion in the lot, though when its runs away with Bayard right through the gate they "hurl themselves to safety" (129).
This is the "small negro child clutching a stick of striped candy" that Bayard has to jump the stallion over as it bolts away from the livery stable (129-30).
