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.

They had been painted in hunting suits of deerskin, with the fringed borders and beaded moccasins, and raccoon skin caps.
These were men, Dick's great grandfather and Harry's.

An immense pride that he was the great-grandson of one of them suddenly swelled up in his bosom, and he was proud, too, that the descendants of the borderers, and of the earlier borderers in the east, should show the same spirit and stamina.