Suratt does not bother going to see the third man who he heard owns goats, because he assumes this man too - whom "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" calls "the other goat owner" - has already sold his goats to Flem Snopes as well (140).
These people - "men, women, and children, octogenarian and suckling" - stand along the fence for "two weeks," steadily watching Henry Armstid as he frantically keeps digging for buried treasure that is not there (404).
There's no question that Henry Armstid has driven himself mad "spading himself into the waxing twilight with the regularity of a mechanical toy" ("Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," 137) in his "spent and unflagging fury" (The Hamlet, 404) to find buried treasure where there is none. But in both these texts there is something equally disconcerting about the fixed stare on the faces of the country people who gather from many miles around to watch him dig for "a week" (in the short story, 136) or even "two weeks" (in the novel, 404).
In "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" this polite "small boy in overalls" whom Suratt sees beside the barn three miles from town does not get his joke about Flem and goats (140).
in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" the "second goat owner" lives four miles further from Varner's store than the "first" one, but he too has already sold his goats to Flem Snopes when Suratt gets to his place (139).
Both "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and The Hamlet refer to the enslaved people who labored on the Frenchman's place before the Civil War as "the progenitors of saxophone players in Harlem honky-tonks" (136, 375). Nothing more is said, but implicitly this reference the narrative looks ahead both to the Great Migration in which millions of southern blacks moved to northern cities (a movement that was just beginning at the time the story and the novel take place) and to the Jazz Age of the 1920s
As an itinerant salesman, of sewing machines and anything else that he can swap or sell, Suratt regularly meets and does business with the lower class population of at least three counties, including Yoknapatawpha. The groups he talks with in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" include men "squatting . . . on the porch of a crossroads store," and "women surrounded by laden clotheslines and blackened wash pots" (138).
In "Lizards in Jamshy'd Courtyard" Suratt gives away the one dollar profit he made on the goat contract that Flem pre-empted to "a boy and a girl" who are "carrying a basket" as they enter Varner's store (140). Suratt calls them "chillens" (140).
"Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" says that Suratt owns "half of a restaurant" in Jefferson (150). The other half is owned by "his brother-in-law" (141) - which is all we know about this man. (The earlier "Centaur in Brass" said even less about this half-owner. In the later novel The Hamlet this brother-in-law is named Aaron Rideout.)
