Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/256

Rh "Oh, if one could only paint light and fire!" cried Stewart. "Nobody can really do it—but I'm going to try."

And one clear November night when Floyd had taken him up to the hilltop that overlooked the mills and the river, Stewart was for a long time silent. "I did n't know it was anything like this," he said presently, and then was silent again. Two miles of iron works lay before him, vast, shadowy forms of buildings weirdly illuminated by irregular leaps and jets of flame. The trains bearing the hot ingots crawled about through the yards like huge glow-worms. Flags of fire sprang out of tall chimneys, signaled for a moment, and died away. At intervals from heights in mid-air caldrons of metal were spilled with a roar, and the shower of vari-colored fire and flame sent sparks soaring skyward even after it had been itself licked up by the night. The steady red glow of open furnaces, the red shuttling of beams on the rollers in the plate-mills and of rods in the rod-mills, and the gigantic flow of molten metal at blast furnaces and converter made a spectacular and dramatic display that appealed deeply to Stewart. "Oh, but this is the real thing!" he exclaimed at last. "I had no idea it was so gorgeous and magnificent. If a man could only paint this—but he'd need a mile of canvas! But parts of it—there, those three figures down there in the light of that furnace, Floyd! Just little glimpses like that—would n't they be pictures!"

In the way of painting such nocturnes, indeed, in the way of painting any pictures at the mills, there were practical difficulties to be surmounted. Some things had to be worked up at home from rough pencil sketches and memory. Others Stewart, with the enterprise of enthusiasm, determined to paint upon the spot. In two or three visits on which Floyd did not accompany him, he succeeded in breaking down Tustin's antipathy, When Stewart deliberately set out to win a man, he never failed. By