Two hours later, Sarty sees de Spain ride up to his father. Along with Sarty, we do not know what trespasses between the two men, but it is soon apparent that de Spain has brought the rug for Snopes to clean. Later, not satisfied with the way his two "bovine" daughters do the job, Snopes picks up a field stone and begins to vigorously scrub — and ruin — the rug himself. His motivations for deliberately soiling and then ruining the rug are essentially related to his wounded foot and his wounded pride. He resents being treated worse than most blacks would be treated, and he is angered by de Spain's contempt for him.
Early the next morning, Sarty is awakened by his father, who tells him to saddle the mule. With Sarty riding and Snopes walking, they carry the rolled-up rug back to de Spain's, throw it on his front porch, and return home. Later that morning, de Spain rides up and infuriatingly tells Snopes that the rug is ruined, and that he is charging him 20 bushels of corn for destroying it, in addition to what Snopes already owes for renting the farm.
The snobbish tone that de Spain uses to berate Snopes — "But you never had a hundred dollars. You never will." — prompts Sarty to side with his father against the landowner. Sarty affectionately addresses his father as "Pap" and promises that de Spain "won't git no twenty bushels! He won't git none!" In supporting his father against dc Spain, he distinguishes between the severity of burning a barn and his father's role in ruining the rug. While barn burning is intolerable to Sarty, 20 bushels of corn as punishment for destroying a rug is excessive injustice, as the justice of the Peace will rule later. However, Sarty notes, one benefit of his father's having to pay the twenty bushels is that it might make him ". . . stop forever and always from being what he used to be." Sarty's hoping for something to happen that will force his father to quit burning barns emphasizes his innate desire to conform to society's justice — so long as that justice is fair.
