Grumby's Hideout (Location Key)

A cotton press or compress is the machine that compacts the ginned cotton into tight bales. The abandoned cotton compress that Grumby and his gang of "Independents" use as a hideout is described in the Unvanquished stories as a "huge rotting building" (96). At the end of "The Unvanquished" Bayard and Ringo open the door to find Granny's murdered body lying on a floor "raised about two feet from the earth" (96), with the smell of gunpowder lingering in the air. After they have tracked Grumby down in "Vendee" and avenged Granny, Uncle Buck describes riding up to the "old compress" and seeing "that murdering scoundrel pegged out on the door to it all except the right hand" (117). The compress is "located on the Tallahatchie River, sixty miles away" from the Sartoris Plantation (94) - though we have to speculate on whether it's up- or downstream from Yoknapatawpha.