Site of Bayard's First Accident|Nine-Mile Branch (Location Key)

Our assumption that the creek where the bodies are re-buried in Intruder in the Dust, published in 1948, is probably the same as the creek into which Bayard Sartoris crashes his car two decades earlier, in Flags in the Dust, is an interpretive opinion. In the later novel there's no ambiguity about the location of the bridge over the Nine-Mile Branch: it's name measures its distance from Jefferson and Lucas Beauchamp gives Chick Mallison very specific directions to get to it. But while the route over which the two Negroes take the injured Bayard to Sartoris is described in enough detail (216-19) to make it clear that that novel's "creek . . . beneath a stone bridge" is in the northeastern part of Yoknapatawpha (213) and somewhere close to the site of the Nine-Mile Branch, there's no way to know for sure if Faulkner was imagining the two places as occupying the same spot on his own evolving map of the county. There are many similarities in his descriptions of the two locations (compare Flags, 213ff, with Intruder, 146ff); it has to be acknowledged, however, that our conflation of them is conjectural.