Quiet Road in Frenchman's Bend (Location Key)

The first time Houston is murdered in the fictions, in "The Hound," the man who shoots him is named Cotton and the spot is described as "a quiet road, little used," a "short cut between [Houston's] house and Varner's store; a quiet, fading, grass-grown trace along the edge of the river bottom" (152-53). There Cotton lies in ambush "behind a log" in a "thicket" of bushes until Houston rides by (152). The next three times Faulkner recounts this event, in all three volumes in the Snopes trilogy, the man who pulls the trigger is Mink Snopes, but the spot is always described essentially the same way (The Hamlet, 242; The Town, 83-84; The Mansion, 42).