Temple's aunt "up north" may really exist, though it is clear that when the local newspaper in Jackson publishes the news that Temple's father has sent his daughter to spend time with this woman, that is a fiction intended to cover Temple's disappearance from college (176).
George seems to be the regular porter on the train between Oxford and Holly Springs. Clarence Snopes invariably tips him with a cigar instead of cash, but when Horace asks George what he is going to do with it, he replies "I wouldn't give it to nobody I know" (177).
All we know about this character is that, when Horace asks the post office clerk at the University if he knows where Temple has gone, the clerk in reply asks him if he is "another detective" - suggesting that a detective of some kind has already been looking for Judge Temple's missing daughter (171). We don't even know if he is a private detective, or a policeman.
Clarence Snopes is identified the "son of a restaurant-owner" in Yoknapatawpha (175). In Flags in the Dust his father is identified as I.O. Snopes, and the restaurant is owned by Flem Snopes, the patriarch of (to quote Sanctuary again) the "family which had been moving into Jefferson for the past twenty years" (175).
Both Horace and, before him, a private detective apply for information about Temple's whereabouts to the man who works as a clerk in the university branch of the post office. "Young," with a "dull face," "horn[-rimmed] glasses" and "meticulous" hair (171), he tells Horace that she has quit school. (Less than a decade before he wrote Sanctuary Faulkner himself had been the clerk in this post office.)
This icon represents two sets of college students. (1) The classmates Temple thinks of twice during her ordeal at the Frenchman's place: first, while lying in the dark at the Old Frenchman's place, when she thinks of "the slow couples strolling toward the sound of the supper bell" (51); and then, while hiding from Pap, whom she hears defecating in the barn, when she imagines them "leaving the dormitories in their new spring clothes" toward the bells of the churches (87; see also 152). (2) The "throng of them" as seen by Horace when he gets off the train at the Oxford station (170).
