Monuments and footprints: The mythology of Flem Snopes

SHORTLY BEFORE THE MURDER of his longtime foe, Gavin Stevens, Jefferson's most prominent lawyer and amateur romantic hero-cumpoet, rushes across the town square to warn Flem Snopes of his cousin Mink's release from Parchman jail. Gaining admission to the closed bank, he knocks "at the door on which Colonel Sartoris had had the word PRIVATE lettered by hand sixty years ago," and enters:

Snopes was sitting not at the desk but with his back to it, facing the cold now empty fireplace, his feet raised and crossed against the same heel-scratches whose initial inscribing Colonel Sartoris…