Faulkner uses comic techniques that he borrowed and developed from his own regional tradition, southwestern humor. He develops the tall tale, for example, in his story of how the adventurers become stuck at Hell Creek, a series of mud holes faithfully plowed by a local entrepeneur to make the services of his mule team essential for continuing the journey. The complex swapping of car and horse is a tall tale of trading of the kind that appears often in Faulkner and in earlier Southern writers. One of Faulkner's main additions to his tradition is an increased complexity of the comic complications and of subtlety in those characters who must deal with them.

Faulkner raises these complications to such a level that it requires acute moral reasoning to escape them with honor.