Albert Pike was a pioneer and a free lance. From school-teaching in old Newburyport he broke away in 1831 to the new Southwest. Successively explorer, editor, and lawyer in New Mexico and Arkansas for some fifteen years, he found time also to gratify a strong literary impulse. On his journey out he sent to the American Monthly Magazine (1831) both prose and verse, and to the same journal five years later his Letters from Arkansas. Meantime (1834) he had published in Boston the thin volume from which is taken the following tale. Hymns to the Gods appeared in Blackwood for June, 1839 (volume xlv, page 819; see also volume xlvii, page 354), with a letter dated at Little Rock, August 15, 1838. (The American Cyclopedia puts the original publication of these at Boston, 1831.) After serving against Mexico and in the Confederacy, he gave himself mainly to the practice of the law. But he edited the Memphis Appeal, 1867–1868, published volumes of his verse in 1854, 1873, and 1882, and wrote extensively, as an adept, on freemasonry.

Though Pike has more narrative directness than Hall, he is usually loose in narrative structure. Plot seems of smaller concern to him than setting. The abundance of vivid detail and some nervous force in the phrase make his sketches permanently convincing as description.