When the family arrives at the new sharecropping farm, Snopes takes Sarty along with him to see Major de Spain, "the man that aims to begin to-morrow owning me body and soul for the next eight months." Arriving at the landowner's mansion, Sarty is astonished by its size. Faulkner emphasizes his theme of justice by having Sarty compare the de Spain mansion to a place of law: "Hit's big as a courthouse . . . They are safe from him." Sarty thinks that the mere magnificence of the mansion will stop his father from burning more barns. This belief, no matter how false it might be, creates "a surge of peace and joy" within the young boy, who has known only a life of "frantic grief and despair." He hopes that his father will be as affected by the house's grandeur as he is, and that the stateliness of de Spain's plantation will "even change him now from what maybe he couldn't help but be." Sarty's dream is admirable and demonstrates his youthful innocence, but we know that he will be sorely disappointed.
Immediately, Sarty notices that his father possesses a "stiff black back" that is not dwarfed by the house. Snopes is defiant of the mansion's magnificence, and as Sarty watches him walk down the lane toward the house, we are presented with the central image of the story:
"Watching him, the boy remarked the absolutely undeviating course which his father held and saw the stiff foot come squarely down in a pile of fresh droppings where a horse had stood in the drive and which his father could have avoided by a simple change of stride."
