Unnamed Young Man Sartoris Killed

In The Reivers the "twenty-year-old Yoknapatawpha County youth" who was killed by Colonel John Sartoris cannot be specifically identified (73). In other Yoknapatawpha fictions Sartoris kills a number of different men. If Faulkner is thinking of one of them here, it is most likely the man Sartoris shot as a robber in both Flags in the Dust (1929) and "An Odor of Verbena," the last story in The Unvanquished (1938). In "Verbena" this man is identified as "almost a neighbor, a hillman," whom Sartoris shot "quickly," before it was absolutely clear that he intended to rob Sartoris of the money he was carrying to help pay for building the railroad. In The Reivers, that "railroad" is mentioned in the same sentence as the "murdered" man (73).