Another quality of Old Southwest humor is exaggeration, which Faulkner certainly uses when he describes the horses' wild "cattymount" behavior. For example, our first glimpse of the animals involves the sewing machine agent's unexpected run-in with them at the beginning of the story: "Here I was this morning pretty near half way to town, with the team ambling along and me, setting in the buckboard about half asleep when all of a sudden something come surging up outen the bushes and jumped the road clean, without touching hoof to it. It flew right over my team big as a billboard and flying through the air like a hawk." Such observations create an unbelievability, which is characteristic of the tall tale. Certainly the agent's taking "thirty minutes to stop my team" after the horses jump over him enhances the tale's comic quality.
"Spotted Horses" was first published in Scribner's Magazine for June 1931. Faulkner included an expanded version of the story in his novel The Hamlet (1940). This expanded version includes as its last section a courtroom scene in which Mrs. Armstid sues Flem Snopes for five dollars, and Mrs. Tull sues Eck Snopes for damages sustained by her husband. Both suits are dismissed after neither woman can prove who owns the horses. The discussion in these Notes follows the text originally published in Scribner's, which is anthologized more often than the longer text.
