Sartoris calls the French woman who leaves him for Spoomer in "All the Dead Pilots" "'Toinette," which we assume is a contracted form of Antoinette. She is a barmaid in a lower-class bar in Amiens and the second woman who has left Sartoris for Spoomer.
This is the "someone" in "The Hound" to whom one of the Negroes in jail is yelling through the window (163). It could just as easily be a woman as a man, but while the race is not specified, other Yoknapatawpha fictions, in which friends and family of black prisoners often gather outside the same window - not to mention the etiquette of Jim Crow segregation, which makes it unlikely that a Negro in jail would be yelling at a white person - explain why we assume this "someone" is also black.
In "The Hound" the clerk named Snopes tells Cotton that the man who found his shotgun in the slough where he tried to hide it was "a nigger squirl hunter" (159). When Faulkner re-tells this story in The Hamlet, Cotton is named Mink Snopes, the clerk is named Lump Snopes, and the Negro who "found that durn gun" is fishing instead of hunting - actually, he is "grabbling," in which you try to catch the fish under water with your bare hands (257).
The county sheriff in "The Hound" is unnamed. He is described as "past middle-age," "a fat, slow man in denim trousers and a collarless white shirt" who smokes a corn cob pipe (156). At first he seems more concerned with his "supper" than with investigating Houston's disappearance (158), but that seems at least in part a disguise. He figures out how to identify and capture the killer, and transports him to jail with both professional care and human respect, while making sure that they eat on the way and also will be "home for supper" on time (163).
Ernest Cotton is a bachelor and an unsuccessful farmer whose hapless attempt to avenge himself against a more prosperous neighbor is at the center of "The Hound." The narrator describes him as "a mild man in worn overalls, with a gaunt face and lack-luster eyes like a sick man" (157). He is also a murderer and would-be suicide, though unsuccessful at those as well. (When Faulkner revised this story for inclusion in The Hamlet, he made Cotton's character a cousin of Flem named Mink Snopes.)
The young men of Frenchman's Bend who "swarm around Eula like bees around a honey pot" (166) appear in four different texts, beginning with "Spotted Horses," the text in which that quotation occurs. Their role in The Hamlet is the largest of the four. They court her for several years, "week and week and Sunday and Sunday" (148), during which time they are jealous rivals of each other until an outsider, an itinerant salesman, appears, and then they band together to drive him away.
The rural and poor hamlet of Frenchman's Bend appears or is referred to in 18 different Yoknapatawpha fictions; this entry focuses on one of the texts that characterizes the people who live there as a group. "The "folks," as Suratt calls the poor farmers and their families in "Spotted Horses" (165), congregate at Varner's store or the horse auction, and provide a kind of audience for Flem Snopes' rise from tenant farmer to the son-in-law of the hamlet's richest man.
Flem tells Ratliff that Eustace Grimm is "eating at Winterbottom's where I happen to be boarding" (388). It's likely that this is the farmer named Winterbottom who appears in two earlier texts, and that he's renting a room in his farm house rather than running an actual boarding house, but that conclusion is based on the brief appearances he makes in "Spotted Horses" and Light in August.
In "Spotted Horses," Ernest is one of the men standing around Mrs. Littlejohn's the evening of the auction. Since "he lives neighbors with" the Armstids, he is sent to tell Mrs. Armstid that her husband has been injured (177). He also is selected from the group of boarders by Mrs. Littlejohn to help Will Varner set Henry's leg.
