These are the various businessmen in the town where Horace lives at the end of Flags in the Dust. On his walk to the train station he sees and greets "merchants, another lawyer, his barber" and "a young man who was trying to sell him a car" (374).
In Flags in the Dust the men who own businesses or have offices or work in stores on the Square appear several times, specifically separated out from the larger population of Jefferson. They most frequently are associated with either Old Bayard or Jenny Du Pre.
These are the anonymous "boys and girls" in Flags in the Dust who "lingered on spring and summer nights" among the birds and bushes in the lot on which the unnamed "hillman" later built his home (25).
In Flags in the Dust this man sits in front of Rogers' restaurant, "a man of at least forty" who is wearing a motley collection of uniforms and playing a guitar and harmonica (which the narrative calls a "mouthorgan," 118). The narrative describes what he plays as "a plaintive reiteration of rich monotonous chords, rhythymic as a mathematical formula but without music" (118). The tin cup at his feet contains "a dime and three pennies" (118).
In Flags in the Dust this is the employee inside the train's baggage car. His race is not specified, and his reply to Horace's concern about the fragility of his glass blowing equipment makes it hard to determine it. Linguistically he sounds 'black': "All right, colonel. . . . we ain't hurt her none, I reckon. If we have, all you got to do is sue us" (157). But his unsubmissive attitude toward the white Horace suggests he is 'white' himself.
In Flags in the Dust this is the fellow aviator at the Dayton airfield who, after trying to talk Bayard out of flying the experimental plane, loans him a helmet and goggles, and offers him a woman's garter for luck.
In Flags in the Dust Young Bayard mentions this major during his talk with Rafe MacCallum "about the war"; the memory features a fight in "the Leicester lounge" in which "the Anzac lost two teeth" and Bayard himself "got a black eye" (124). The fight may have been over "two ladies," and may have been between Bayard and the Major, but none of that is made clear. Faulkner may have meant this character to be the same as the Australian captain whose teeth Bayard knocks out in a bar in London (cf.
He is mentioned in Flags in the Dust by Monaghan, who says that during the Great War Young Bayard "knocked two teeth" out of this "Australian captain" in a fight over a girl in a "London joint" (385). This officer's role closely resembles that of the unnamed Australian officer Bayard tells Rafe MacCallum about much earlier in the novel, but that officer was a major, and the nightclub was in Leicester.
This very peripheral character is mentioned in Flags in the Dust in one of Monaghan's anecdotes about his experiences with Bayard Sartoris in World War I as the "A.P.M." whose whistle Comyn took and used to start a melee in an Amiens night club called the Cloche-Clos (387). The Provost Marshals ran the army's military police.
