Black Rock by Ralph Connor — Read

Through the long summer the mountains and the pines were with me. And through the winter, too, busy as I was filling in my Black Rock sketches for the railway people who would still persist in ordering them by the dozen, the memory of that stirring life would come over me, and once more I would be among the silent pines and the mighty snow-peaked mountains. And before me would appear the red-shirted shantymen or dark-faced miners, great, free, bold fellows, driving me almost mad with the desire to seize and fix those swiftly changing groups of picturesque figures. At such times I would drop my sketch, and with eager brush seize a group, a face, a figure, and that is how my studio comes to be filled with the men of Black Rock. There they are all about me. Graeme and the men from the woods, Sandy, Baptiste, the Campbells, and in many attitudes and groups old man Nelson; Craig, too, and his miners, Shaw, Geordie, Nixon, and poor old Billy and the keeper of the League saloon.

It seemed as if I lived among them, and the illusion was greatly helped by the vivid letters Graeme sent me from time to time. Brief notes came now and then from Craig too, to whom I had sent a faithful account of how I had brought Mrs. Mavor to her ship, and of how I had watched her sail away with none too brave a face, as she held up her hand that bore the miners' ring, and smiled with that deep light in her eyes. Ah! those eyes have driven me to despair and made me fear that I am no great painter after all, in spite of what my friends tell me who come in to smoke my good cigars and praise my brush. I can get the brow and hair, and mouth and pose, but the eyes! the eyes elude me -- and the faces of Mrs. Mavor on my wall, that the men praise and rave over, are not such as I could show to any of the men from the mountains.