McCarron, Father of Hoke

Hoake McCarron's father makes a dashing figure in The Hamlet: a "handsome, ready-tongued, assured and pleasant man who had come into the country without specific antecedents and no definite past" (148). He makes a living gambling "in the back rooms of country stores or the tack rooms of stables" (149) until he elopes with Alison Hoake, returning ten days later to become a good husband and father. He is killed, however, in a gambling house and was allegedly shot by a woman. After his death, "there remained only the legend of the money and jewels he was supposed to have won" and "bricked up in one of the chimneys of the house" (150). In The Mansion, where Hoake is spelled Hoke, he is only briefly mentioned but not named by Hoke himself (194).