Hoake - only his last name is given in The Hamlet - is "a well-to-do landowner" (152). After his daughter Alison elopes with McCarron, "Old Hoake had sat for ten days now with a loaded shotgun across his lap" (153) before the newlyweds returned. McCarron, however, learned his father-in-law's business quickly and Hoake eventually bequeathed the flourishing property to his grandson, Hoake McCarron.
In The Hamlet the store owner from whom Ab buys the milk separator is named Cain . (In the original version of this event, "Fool about a Horse" [1936], the man who owns the store is Ike McCaslin.)
The younger of the two men who discover Lonnie's body in "Hand upon the Waters" is described as "a youth, less than twenty, by his face" (67). He tells Stevens that, after the discovery, he "won't never eat another" fish (74).
The older of the two men who discover Lonnie's body in "Hand upon the Waters" is described as "a man of about forty" (72); his dialect - "Him and Joe" (67), "Yonder's his boat" (69) - indicates that, like most of the story's characters, he's a "country-bred man" (78).
In "Hand upon the Waters" Nate's wife appears in the novel only as another voice in the darkness at their cabin, when readers hear her telling her husband to "let them white folks alone" (80) - suggesting she has more authority over Nate than Gavin Stevens does.
In "Hand upon the Waters" someone informs Stevens about both Lonnie's funeral and Joe's whereabouts on the day he was buried. There is good reason to think this person is someone from Frenchman's Bend, and it may even be the coroner whose telephone call first brought Stevens into the story, but all the text provides is a voice which speaks in correct (i.e. not vernacular) English and with unmistakable if unsentimental sympathy for Joe's loss.
These are the local Yoknapatawpha men in "Hand upon the Waters" who own the "topless and battered cars, the saddled horses and mules and the wagons, the riders and drivers of which" Gavin Stevens knows by name (72). The men show up to Lonnie Grinnup's inquest in their "clean Saturday overalls and shirts and the bared heads and the sunburned necks striped with the white razor lines of Saturday neck shaves" (72). Among these men are the "folks" who go out to view Grinnup's camp and trotline later and see Joe hanging about (77).
In "Hand upon the Waters" this agent for the insurance company that issued the policy on Lonnie's life willingly follows Gavin Stevens’s instructions to help capture his killer.
