The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Henry Armstid appears in the story at the auction; he comes "Shoving up to the gate in them patched overalls and one of them dangle-armed shirts of hisn" (169). He is a poor and foolish farmer who is both emotionally and physically abusive to his wife: in spite of her pleas, he squanders her hard-earned five dollars on one of the spotted horses, and then "hits her with the rope" he is trying to use to catch the animal (172). He eventually breaks his leg trying.

Eck Snopes is one of Flem's cousins, though the narrator tells us that "Flem would skin Eck quick as he would ere a one of us" (168). After Eck helps board and feed the ponies, the Texas man gives him one to help start the bidding. In his hapless attempt to catch that horse, Eck manages to break its neck.

Mrs. Littlejohn is a hard-working, pragmatic widow and the owner of Littlejohn's Hotel, the boarding house where the narrator stays when he is in Frenchman's Bend. The narrator tells us that during the horse auction "she would stand at the fence a while and then go back into the house and come out again with a arm full of wash and stand at the fence again" (169); she is watching the behavior of "them fool men" (174) as she goes about her work as a business woman.

Referred to repeatedly as "the Texas man" by the narrator (167), and once by Flem as "Buck" (173), the man who brings the wild ponies from Texas into Frenchman's Bend carries "a ivory-handled pistol and a box of gingersnaps" in his back pocket (167). The day after he arrives at Mrs. Littlejohn's, he auctions off the horses. At the end of that day he drives off on the buckboard wagon he swapped for the last two horses. Although he takes advantage of the men of Frenchman's Bend, he shows his sympathy for Mrs. Armstid by refusing to accept Henry Armstid’s bid.

Uncle Billy Varner’s youngest daughter, Jody’s sister and Flem Snopes wife. Eula is described as a fertile and earthy female, a "big, soft-looking [gal] that could giggle richer than plowed new-ground" attracting competitive suitors who swarm around her "like bees around a honey pot" (166). When she becomes pregnant by one of them, it seems her father arranges for her to marry Flem Snopes and they move to Texas for about a year. When she returns with a "three-months-old" who "can already pull up on a chair" (167), it is no great secret to the townspeople what has transpired.

In the Yoknapatawpha stories as a group, Uncle Billy Varner appears as the biggest land and business owner in Frenchman's Bend. In this story, he appears as a veterinarian who is summoned, along with his "horse-doctoring grip," or bag, to set Henry Armstid's broken leg (177). He is also Flem Snopes father-in-law: when he finds out that Eula, his daughter, is pregnant, he arranges for Flem and Eula to marry. (He appears or is mentioned in 9 Yoknapatawpha fictions, in 2 of them as "Uncle Billy," and in 7 as "Will.")

Will Varner’s son and Eula Snopes brother, whom Flem Snopes supplants in the running of Varner's store. The narrator predicts that if they were both in the store in ten years, "it would be Jody clerking for Flem Snopes" (166).

The story begins "Yes, sir. Flem Snopes has filled that whole country full of spotted horses" (165) and ends with I.O. claiming "You can't git ahead of Flem. You can't touch him. Aint'he a sight now?" (183). As this introduction suggests, Flem is arguably the central character of "Spotted Horses," though he seldom appears in the action. Flem Snopes appears throughout the Yoknapatawpha saga as a representative of a modern, upwardly mobile, capitalist, 20th-century American ethos, and Faulkner's imagination returned to him often across the course of his career.

The unnamed vernacular narrator who tells the story is one of Faulkner's favorite characters, identified in other early Faulkner texts as V.K. Suratt - a name Faulkner later changed to V.K. Ratliff.  His voice identifies him as a country man, but the narrator identifies himself as an itinerant salesman, in Frenchman's Bend in order to "sell a machine" - a sewing machine - to a Mrs. Burden who lives nearby (174).  He is returning to Jefferson as the story begins, colloquially, as if he is speaking to a live audience with whom he feels very comfortable: "Yes, sir.

One of the three town mayors in the story, and the only one without a name, this man takes office in the early 20th century, and seems much less chivalrous than his 19th-century predecessor, Colonel Sartoris, who treats Emily as a lady who should not be bothered about financial matters . This new mayor sees her first and foremost as a tax-payer, though he is chivalrous enough to offer "to send his car" to bring her to the town's offices to pay her long-overdue property tax (120).