SnopessInTH

The one Snopes in this tale is the clerk in Varner's store in Frenchman's Bend, who tries to turn Cotton's murder of Houston into a source of profit for himself. Both the job and the behavior could point to Flem as the Snopes Faulkner has in mind, though the larger context of the Yoknapatawpha canon makes it more likely that this time the unscrupulous clerk is a cousin of Flem's named Launcelot by his mother but called Lump by the people of the Bend. (When Faulkner revised this 1930 story for inclusion in The Hamlet ten years later he identified the clerk as Lump, and transformed the killer into another of Flem's cousins, the violent Mink; both Mink and Lump make their first appearance in that novel.) In any case, the clerk's venality in this tale provides a kind of comic relief to the horror of the killer's actions.