Ethel Morton's Enterprise Part 37

"I stayed in Pittsburg once in a boarding house where the rooms were heated with natural gas," said Mr. Emerson. "It made a sufficient heat, but you had to be careful not to turn the burner low just before all the methodical Pittsburgers cooked dinner, for if you made it too low the flame might go out when the pressure was light."

"Did the opposite happen at night?"

"It did. In the short time I was there the newspapers noted several cases of fires caused by people leaving their stoves turned up high at night and the flames bursting into the room and setting fire to some inflammable thing near at hand when the pressure grew strong after the good Pittsburgers went to bed."

"It certainly is useful," commended Mrs. Morton. "A turn of the key and that's all."

"No coal to be shovelled--think of it!" exclaimed Roger, who took care of several furnaces in winter. "No ashes to be sifted and carried away!

The thought causes me to burst into song," and he chanted ridicuously:--

"Given a tight tin stove, asbestos fluff, A match of wood, an iron key, and, puff, Thou, Natural Gas, wilt warm the Arctic wastes, And Arctic wastes are Paradise enough."

As the train drew out of the city the young people's expectations of fairyland were not fulfilled.

"I don't see anything but dirt and horridness, Grandfather," complained Ethel Brown.

Mr. Emerson looked out of the window thoughtfully for a moment.

"True," he answered, "it's not yet dark enough for the magic to work."

"No wonder everything is sooty and grimy with those chimneys all around us throwing out tons and tons of soft coal smoke to settle over everything. Don't they ever stop?"

"They're at it twenty-four hours a day," returned her grandfather. "But night will take all the ugliness into its arms and hide it; the sordidness and griminess will disappear and fairyland will come forth for a playground. The ugly smoke will turn into a thing of beauty. The queer point of it all is," he continued, shaking his head sadly, "fairyland is there all the time and always beautiful, only you can't see it."

d.i.c.ky's eyes opened wide and he gazed out of the window intent on peering into this mysterious invisible playground.

"Lots of things are like that," agreed Roger. "Don't you remember how those snowflakes we looked at under the magnifying gla.s.s on Ethel Blue's birthday burst into magnificent crystals? You wouldn't think a handful of earth--just plain dirt--was pretty, would you? But it is. Look at it through a microscope and see what happens."

"But, Grandfather, if the beauty is there right now why can't we see it?" insisted Ethel Brown.

Mr. Emerson stared out of the window for a moment.

"That was a pretty necklace of beads you strung for Ayleesabet."

"We all thought they were beauty beads."

"And that was a lovely string of pearls that Mrs. Schermerhorn wore at the reception for which you girls decorated her house."

There could be no disagreement from that opinion.

"Since Ayleesabet is provided with such beauties we shan't have to fret about getting her anything else when she goes to her coming-out party, shall we?"

"What are you saying, Grandfather!" exclaimed Helen. "Of course Ayleesabet's little string of beads can't be compared with a pearl necklace!"

"There you are!" retorted Mr. Emerson; "Helen has explained it. This fairyland we are going to see can't be compared with the glory of the sun any more than Ayleesabet's beads can be compared with Mrs.

Schermerhorn's pearls. We don't even see the fairyland when the sun is s.h.i.+ning but when the sun has set the other beauties become clear."

"O-o-o!" shouted d.i.c.ky, whose nose had been glued to the window in an effort to prove his grandfather's statement; "look at that funny umbrella!"

Everybody jumped to one window or another, and they saw in the gathering darkness a sudden blast of flame and white hot particles shooting into the air and spreading out like an umbrella of vast size.

"Look at it!" exclaimed the two Ethels, in a breath; "isn't that beautiful! What makes it?"

"The grimy steel mills of the daytime make the fairyland of night,"

announced Mr. Emerson.

Across the river they noticed suddenly that the smoke pouring from a chimney had turned blood red with tongues of vivid flame shooting through it like pulsing veins. There was no longer any black smoke. It had changed to heavy ma.s.ses of living fire of s.h.i.+fting shades. Great ingots of steel sent the observers a white hot greeting or glowed more coolly as the train shot by them. Huge piles of smoking slag that had gleamed dully behind the mills now were veined with vivid red, looking like miniature volcanoes streaked with lava.

It was sometimes too beautiful for words to describe it suitably, and sometimes too terrible for an exclamation to do it justice. It created an excitement that was wearying, and when the train pulled into Brownsville it was a tired party that found its way to the hotel.

As the children went off to bed Mr. Emerson called out "To-morrow all will be grime and dirt again; fairyland has gone."

"Never mind, Grandfather," cried Ethel Brown, "we won't forget that it is there just the same if only we could see it."

"And we'll think a little about the splendiferousness of the sun, too,"

called Helen from the elevator. "I never thought much about it before."

CHAPTER XVII

THE MISSING HEIRESS

Mr. Emerson's investigations proved that Stanley Clark had left Brownsville several days previously and had gone to Millsboro, farther up the Monongahela.

He had left that as his forwarding address, the hotel clerk said. This information necessitated a new move at once, so the next morning, bright and early, Mr. Emerson led his party to the river where they boarded a little steamer scarcely larger than a motor boat.

They were soon puffing away at a fair rate of speed against the sluggish current. The factories and huge steel plants had disappeared and the banks looked green and country-like as mile after mile slipped by.

Suddenly Roger, who was sitting by the steersman's wheel, exclaimed, "Why, look! there's a waterfall in front of us."

So, indeed, there was, a wide fall stretching from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, but Roger, eyeing it suspiciously, added in an aggrieved tone, "But it's a dam. Must be a dam. Look how straight it is."

"How on earth," called Ethel Blue, "are we going to get over it?"

"Jump up it the way Grandpa told me the salmon fishes do," volunteered d.i.c.ky.

Everybody laughed, but Mr. Emerson declared that was just about what they were going to do. The boat headed in for one end of the dam and her pa.s.sengers soon found themselves floating in a granite room, with huge wooden doors closed behind them. The water began to boil around them, and as it poured into the lock from unseen channels the boat rose slowly. In a little while the Ethels cried that they could see over the tops of the walls, and in a few minutes more another pair of big gates opened in front of them and they glided into another chamber and out into the river again, this time above the "falls."

"I feel as if I had been through the Panama Ca.n.a.l," declared Ethel Blue.

"That's just the way its huge locks work," said Mrs. Morton. "The next time your Uncle Roger has a furlough I hope it will be long enough for us to go down there and see it."

"I wonder," asked Roger, "if there are many more dams like this on the Monongahela."

"There's one about every ten miles," volunteered the steersman. "Until the government put them in only small boats could go up the river. Now good sized ones can go all the way to Wheeling, West Virginia. If you want to, you can go by boat all the way from Wheeling to the Gulf of Mexico."