The road between Jefferson and the large estates on the rich land north of town - including the Backus-Harriss plantation six miles up it - is often traveled in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions. Even in 1940, it is "still just a country road," graveled but not paved (163).
This is where the "neighbor" who "on his way home" often hears what he believes is Guardres training the blind mare behind the stables on the Backus estate (178).
This is the farm belonging to the "neighbor" in "Knight's Gambit" who regularly passes the Backus-Harris estate "on his way home" from Jefferson and often hears what he believes is Guardres training the blind mare (178).
Gualdres builds a little stable "away from the other stables and the paddocks too" (221), where he keeps the old mare he buys in Memphis. He constructed it as part of his plan to hide a sexual affair, but in his own secret plan Max Harriss tries to turn it into a trap in which to destory Gualdres.
When Harriss acquires control of the Backus property, he builds "a polo field" alongside the road (163), and then next to that a steeplechase course. The locals watch as both of these places are constructed, and then again as elegantly dressed men and women from elsewhere compete on both sites. When Captain Gualdres arrives later, he hires more men and imports more material to make the steeplechase course even more challenging.
In "Knight's Gambit" Captain Gualdres builds a little stable "away from the other stables and the paddocks too" (221), where he keeps the old mare he buys in Memphis. Gualdres constructs it as part of his plan to hide a sexual affair, but in his own secret plan Max Harriss tries to turn it into a death trap. In the end it becomes a peculiarly Faulknerian location: the scene-of-a-crime-that-does-not-happen.
In "Knight's Gambit," when Harriss acquires control of the Backus property he builds "a polo field" alongside the road (163), and then next to that a steeplechase course - polo and steeple-chase being, of course, among the aristocratic conventions of England that the South often emulated. The locals watch as both of these places are constructed, and then again as elegantly dressed men and women from elsewhere compete or spectate on both sites.
After his train passes through the Negro section of Jefferson, Charles Mallison sees "the houses of white people" (253). This particular group of white people are clearly lower class: their houses are "no larger than the Negro ones" - but, he immediately adds, these "houses" are "never cabins"; calling them that would mean "you'd probably have a fight on your hands" (253). For the residents, the implication is that their houses are superior to the Negroes' cabins.
This cabin represents the group of "Negro cabins" that Charles Mallison sees from the train window when he returns to Jefferson after enlisting in the Army Air Corps. His description of this "shabby purlieu" of the town emphasizes the poverty of its black inhabitants: the cabins themselves are "awry: not out of plumb [but] beyond plumb," set amidst a "miniature jungle of vegetable patch," "flimsy and make-shift, alien yet inviolably durable" (252-53).
As the story ends, Charles Mallison's mother is going to "ride with him down to the mainline junction" on the train that is taking him to Texas (252). A 'junction' is a town or city where different railroad lines intersect. Given Charles' final destination, it's most likely that the "junction" Faulkner is thinking of is Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, about 170 miles from where Jefferson is imaginatively located.
