Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

So now his bank didn’t have a president any more. Then we found out just who owned the stock in it: that Colonel Sartoris and Major de Spain, Mayor de Spain’s father until he died, had owned two of the three biggest blocks, and old man Will Varner out in Frenchman’s Bend owned the other one. So we thought that maybe it wasn’t just Colonel Sartoris’s father’s cavalry command that got Byron Snopes his job in the bank, but maybe old Will Varner had something to do with it too. Except that we never really believed that since we knew Colonel Sartoris well enough to know that any single one of those old cavalry raids or even just one night around a bivouac fire would have been enough.

Of course there was more of it, that much again and even more scattered around in a dozen families like the Compsons and Benbows and Peabodys and Miss Eunice Habersham and us and a hundred others that were farmers around in the county. Though it wasn’t until Mayor de Spain got elected president of it to succeed Colonel Sartoris (in fact, because of that) that we found out that Mr Flem Snopes had been buying the stock in lots anywhere from one to ten shares for several years; this, added to Mr Varner’s and Mayor de Spain’s own that he had inherited om his father, would have been enough to elect him up from vice president to president (There was so much going on that we didn’t even notice that when the dust finally settled Mr Flem Snopes would be vice president of it too.) even if Mrs Du Pre and Bayard’s wife (Bayard had finally got himself killed testing an aeroplane at an Ohio testing field that they said nobody else would fly and that Bayard himself didn’t have any business in) hadn’t voted theirs for him.

Because Mayor de Spain resigned from being mayor and sold his automobile agency and became president of the bank just in time. Colonel Sartoris’s bank was a national bank because Ratliff said likely Colonel Sartoris knew that would sound safer to country folks with maybe an extra ten dollars to risk in a bank, let alone the female widows and orphans, since females never had much confidence in menfolks’ doings about anything, let alone money, even when they were not widows too. So with a change of presidents like that, Ratliff said the government would have to send somebody to inspect the books even if the regular inspection wasn’t about due; the two auditors waiting in front of the bank at eight o’clock that morning for somebody to unlock the door and let them in, which would have been Byron Snopes except that he didn’t show up. So they had to wait for the next one with a key: which was Mr de Spain.

And by fifteen minutes after eight, which was about thirteen minutes after the auditors decided to start on the books that Byron kept, Mr de Spain found out from the Snopes Hotel that nobody had seen Byron since the southbound train at nine twenty-two last night, and by noon everybody knew that Byron was probably already in Texas though he probably wouldn’t reach Mexico itself for another day yet. Though it was not until two days later that the head auditor was ready to commit himself roughly as to how much money was missing; by that time they had called a meeting of the bank’s board of directors and even Mr Varner that Jefferson never saw once in twelve months had come in and listened to the head auditor for about a minute and then said, “Police hell. Send somebody out home for my pistol, then show me which way he went.”