As Ned puts it in The Reivers, the Parsham constable, Mr. Poleymus, "may be little, and he may be old; but he's a man, mon" (251). Ned admires the way he takes care of his wife, who has had a stroke, washing and feeding her. He also sorts out the various characters and their doings with a clear sense of humanity and justice.
Among the well-known sportsmen who come to Parsham every winter for the "National Trials" of pedigree bird dogs, Lucius mentions four names. Two are identifiable as real men (Horace Lytle and Paul Rainey). Lucius, the narrator of The Reivers, compares "George Peyton" to Lytle: the two are "as magical among bird dog people" as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb are to baseball fans (189).
In The Reivers Otis is Corrie's nephew, visiting Memphis from his home in Arkansas in order to acquire "refinement" (97). Although he has his fifteenth birthday in the course of the story, he is smaller than the 11-year-old Lucius. As Lucius says the first time he sees Otis, "there is something wrong about him" (104). By the time Lucius calls him a "demon child" (154), most readers are likely to agree.
The young black who rides Acheron against Lucius and Lightning in The Reivers is named McWillie. According to Lucius, "for size and age and color [he] might have been Lycurgus' twin" (220).
Mr. McDiarmid is one of the two judges at the horse race in The Reivers. Lucius describes him, memorably, as the operator of "the depot eating room, who . . . could slice a ham so thin that his entire family made a summer trip to Chicago on the profits from one of them" (229).
The "Horace Lytle" whom Lucius mentions in The Reivers in connection with Parsham's annual hunting dog show is almost certainly the real Horace Lytle who in 1927 became the gun dog editor of the magazine Field & Stream. The bird dog he refuses to sell for $5000 - Mary Montrose - was real too: she won the New York Dog Show in 1917.
The Luster in The Reivers works in the livery stable, though his specific job is not made clear. (There's no suggestion that this Luster is the same person who works for the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!.)
Butch, the deputy sheriff who bullies Boon and Corrie in Parsham in The Reivers, says his last name is "Lovemaiden" (187). This could be true, though it's not impossible that he gives himself that name as another way to annoy Boon. He is described as being "almost as big as Boon and almost as ugly, with a red face and a badge" (168) and "a bachelor" (190). Lucius says he smells of "sweat and whiskey" (170).
