Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

To everyone’s surprise, he made not only a decent husband, but son-in-law too. He knew little about farming and did not pretend to like it, nevertheless he served as his father-in-law’s overseer, carrying out the old man’s verbatim instructions like a dictaphone record would have of course, but having himself the gift of getting along well with, and even dominating somewhat, all men not as ready of tongue as he, tugh it was actually his jolly though lightly-balanced temper and his reputation as a gambler which got him the obedience of the Negro field hands even more than his position as the son-in-law or even his proved prowess with a pistol. He even stayed home at night and quit the poker-playing. In fact, later nobody could decide for certain if the cattle-buying scheme had not been the father-in-law’s instead of his. But within a year, by which time he was a father himself, he was buying up cattle and taking them in droves overland to the railroad and Memphis every two or three months. This went on for ten years, by which time the father-in-law had died and left the property to his grandson. Then McCarron made his last trip. Two nights later one of his drovers galloped up to the house and waked his wife. McCarron was dead, and the countryside never did know much about that either, shot in a gambling house apparently. His wife left the nine-year-old boy with the Negro servants and went in the farm wagon and fetched her husband’s body home and buried it on the oak and cedar knoll beside her father and mother. Shortly after that a rumor, a tale of a brief day or two, went about that a woman had shot him. But that died; they only said to one another, “So that’s what he was doing all the time,” and there remained only the legend of the money and jewels he was supposed to have won during the ten years and fetched home at night and, with his wife’s help, bricked up in one of the chimneys of the house.

The son, Hoake, at twenty-three looked older. This was his father’s assurance in his face which was bold and handsome too. It was also a little swaggering and definitely spoiled though not vain so much as intolerant, which his father’s face had not been. It also lacked humor and equability and perhaps intelligence too, which his father’s face had not lacked, but which that of the man who sat for ten days after his daughter’s elopement with a loaded shotgun on his lap, probably did. He grew up with a Negro lad for his sole companion. They slept in the same room, the Negro on a pallet on the floor, until he was ten years old. The Negro was a year older. When they were six and seven, he conquered the Negro with his fists in fair fight. Afterward he would pay the Negro out of his pocket money at a standard rate fixed between them, for the privilege of whipping the Negro, not severely, with a miniature riding crop.