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.
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