In Mr. Compson's account of it, Bon's initiation of Henry into the sophisticated world of New Orleans begins with his exposure to the elegant people riding in the city streets: "women, enthroned . . . like painted portraits" and "men in linen a little finer and diamonds a little brighter" than anything Henry had seen before (88). This entry includes the "elegant shapes of young men trim predatory and (at the moment) goatlike" that Henry sees in the auction house Bon takes him to (89).
Each time Bon leaves Sutpen's Hundred to return to New Orleans, he first has to travel overland to the Mississippi River, where he boards a steamboat for the rest of the trip.
Characters in "A Justice" and Absalom, Absalom! travel to and from New Orleans by way of the Mississippi River, after traveling overland between a steamboat landing on the river and Yoknapatawpha. When the Indians in the first text travel that route eastward around 1817, they travel by wagon and the trip takes "three days" (348). It's about four decades later when Bon and Henry travel westward along that route on horseback in Absalom!, presumably on a better road and in less than a day - from late on Christmas Eve through suppertime on Christmas Day, 1860 (267).
