He could not help smiling, even in his misery, as he thought of the man to whom, six months before, he had sold the old Goree homestead.  There had come from “back yan’” in the mountains two of the strangest creatures, a man named Pike Garvey and his wife.  “Back yan’,” with a wave of the hand toward the hills, was understood among the mountaineers to designate the remotest fastnesses, the unplumbed gorges, the haunts of lawbreakers, the wolf’s den, and the boudoir of the bear.  In the cabin far up on Blackjack’s shoulder, in the wildest part of these retreats, this odd couple had lived for twenty years.  They had neither dog nor children to mitigate the heavy silence of the hills.  Pike Garvey was little known in the settlements, but all who had dealt with him pronounced him “crazy as a loon.”  He acknowledged no occupation save that of a squirrel hunter, but he “moonshined” occasionally by way of diversion.  Once the “revenues” had dragged him from his lair, fighting silently and desperately like a terrier, and he had been sent to state’s prison for two years.  Released, he popped back into his hole like an angry weasel.

Fortune, passing over many anxious wooers, made a freakish flight into Blackjack’s bosky pockets to smile upon Pike and his faithful partner.

One day a party of spectacled, knickerbockered, and altogether absurd prospectors invaded the vicinity of the Garvey’s cabin.  Pike lifted his squirrel rifle off the hooks and took a shot at them at long range on the chance of their being revenues.  Happily he missed, and the unconscious agents of good luck drew nearer, disclosing their innocence of anything resembling law or justice.  Later on, they offered the Garveys an enormous quantity of ready, green, crisp money for their thirty-acre patch of cleared land, mentioning, as an excuse for such a mad action, some irrelevant and inadequate nonsense about a bed of mica underlying the said property.

When the Garveys became possessed of so many dollars that they faltered in computing them, the deficiencies of life on Blackjack began to grow prominent.  Pike began to talk of new shoes, a hogshead of tobacco to set in the corner, a new lock to his rifle; and, leading Martella to a certain spot on the mountain-side, he pointed out to her how a small cannon—­doubtless a thing not beyond the scope of their fortune in price—­might be planted so as to command and defend the sole accessible trail to the cabin, to the confusion of revenues and meddling strangers forever.

But Adam reckoned without his Eve.  These things represented to him the applied power of wealth, but there slumbered in his dingy cabin an ambition that soared far above his primitive wants.  Somewhere in Mrs. Garvey’s bosom still survived a spot of femininity unstarved by twenty years of Blackjack.  For so long a time the sounds in her ears had been the scaly-barks dropping in the woods at noon, and the wolves singing among the rocks at night, and it