In The Town this drummer is imagined by Jefferson observers to have oversold some commodity to Wallstreet Panic Snopes, thus making it necessary for him to borrow money.
In The Hamlet this "drummer" is a "youngish city man with city ways" who sees Eula when he finds himself in Frenchman's Bend "by accident" and tries to court her, one time wearing "the first white flannel trousers Frenchman's Bend ever saw" (147). The same pair of "ice cream pants" are "ruined" after the local suitors drive him away (147). According to the narrative, this man already has a "wife and family" (148), but that isn't why the young men of the Bend attack him.
In "Smoke" this "drummer" - a familiar term for traveling salesman when the story was written - supplies the drug store with the unpopular "city cigarettes" that will play such a major role in solving the crime (28).
The drummer in "Dry September" is an out-of-towner, described as looking like "a desert rat in the moving pictures," who gets his shave and haircut from Hawkshaw and enthusiastically joins the lynch mob (170).
Although never named, the drug store clerk in "Uncle Willy" plays a large role in the plot. He arrives in Jefferson "about six months" before Reverend Schultz and Mrs. Merridew hire him to manage the drugstore while Willy undergoes drug treatment in Memphis (232). No one in Jefferson "knows anything about him," but he arrives in town with "letters to the church," which is apparently the basis on which he is hired (232). He completely transforms the store - making it attractive to the "town trade" that had previously shunned it (233).
The part the drugstore clerk plays in "Smoke" is defined by his absence: he goes to dinner, leaving the drug store's proprietor to take his place behind the counter.
In Flags in the Dust the "youthful clerk" in the drug store who re-wraps the package that Joan dropped in the street also "stares at her boldly" (319).
Mink Snopes is defended by a court-appointed lawyer in all three volumes in the Snopes trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion. As the third novel puts it, he is "too young and eager" (47), though as the first one says, he "did what he could" to defend Mink: "talked himself frantic and at last voiceless before the grave impassivity of the jury which resembled a conclave of grown men self-delegated with the necessity . . . of listening to prattle of a licensed child" (368).
In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished Bayard spots the corpse of this Union soldier in the river, hanging over the rump of his dead and floating horse after the bridge was blown up. Because he has a horse, he is either an officer or attached to a cavalry unit, but there is no way to tell which is more likely.
While the clerk himself does not appear in Flags in the Dust, his office does: on rainy days, the narrator says, the "city fathers," the old men who hold various patronage jobs in the town or county government, "move inside [the courthouse] to the circuit clerk's office" (161).
