But it is said that the
best work he ever did is the pair of portraits that face each other in
the Mason home, and the other pair, the exact duplicates that face each
other in the same manner in the Kenton house.
Dick opened a shutter entirely, and the light of the white moon, white
like marble, streamed in. The sudden inpouring illuminated the room
so vividly that Dick's heart missed a beat. It seemed, for a minute,
that the two men in the portraits were stepping from the wall. Then
his heart beat steadily again and the color returned to his face. They
had always been there, those two portraits. Men had never lived more
intensely than they, and the artist, at the instant his genius was
burning brightest, had caught them in the moment of extraordinary
concentration. Their souls had looked through their eyes and his own
soul looking through his had met theirs.
Dick gazed at one and then at the other. There was his great grandfather,
Paul Cotter, a man of vision and inspiration, the greatest scholar the
west had ever produced, and there facing him was his comrade of a long
life-time, Henry Ware, the famous borderer, afterward the great governor
of the state.
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