SartorissInH

Three members of the Sartoris family - four, if we count Ringo, though the novel never names him - cross paths with the saga of the Snopes three decades before the main events of the novel. Ab Snopes' limp is apparently the result of being shot during the Civil War by Colonel John Sartoris "for trying to steal his clay-bank riding stallion during the [Civil] War" (18); however, later in the text the narrator says Ab was shot by "somebody that never even owned the horses" Ab was trying to steal (32). The Colonel's mother-in-law, Rosa Millard, is killed after becoming involved with Ab in what Ratliff calls their "horse- and mule-partnership" (32). After this, "Colonel's boy Bayard and Uncle Buck McCaslin and a nigger" avenge Rosa's death by doing "something" violent to Ab "in the woods" (32). And after this, Ratliff adds, "Ab had to withdraw his allegiance to the Sartorises"; he goes into hiding in Yoknapatawpha's hills while the Colonel "builds his railroad" (32).