As there was no help outwardly he had to burrow for it inwardly. The stimulating wine of memory lay inward, and he drew on it for strength, recalling those hours and even days of quiet thought and talk with Clayton which followed the election. Before him in all its pristine beauty rose that dream of Peter Wingate, that the desert, by which Wingate meant Paradise Valley, should blossom as the rose. Wingate’s hopeful and prophetic sermons had made a deep impression on the plastic mind of the boy who heard them. Though Justin scarcely knew it, that dream of a redeemed desert, working slowly through the years, had become his own. It had long been merely a vague desire, holding at first the form given to it by the minister, that settlers might come in and till the land. But Justin had long since seen that if settlers came in, they must go out again if water was not to be had, and that irrigation alone possessed the transforming power which could make the dream a reality. The farmers now in Paradise Valley were irrigating as well as they could. They had little money and their devices were of a make-shift character. Yet wherever they could induce water to flow the desert bloomed. Justin had come to sympathize with them in their struggle against adverse conditions the more perhaps because he had so long held that guilty knowledge of the fact that Ben Davison had cut their dam. In thus surveying the field before him and choosing between the cattlemen and the irrigationists, as they were represented in the valley of Paradise, which was the only world he knew well, Justin had a growing comprehension of that large truth, that if he who makes two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before is a benefactor, a still greater one is the man who changes a cattle range, where ten acres will hardly support a cow, to an irrigated land where five acres will sustain a home. This was the thing indefinitely and faultily foreshadowed in Peter Wingate’s dream. The conditions in Paradise Valley were duplicated in many places throughout the state. Should the struggling farmers give way to the cattlemen, or should they be assisted? If the farmers held the irrigable lands there would be plenty of range left; for there were millions of acres which could never be touched by water, where cattle could graze undisturbing and undisturbed. But the cattlemen coveted the rich valleys where water could be secured without the expense of pumps and windmills, as well as the dry, bunch-grass uplands. To hold the land they now occupied but did not own, they had allied themselves with the political party which promised a senator whose influence at Washington should favor them. If the agriculturalists won, the illegal fences stretched on every league of grazing land would have to come down, and that would be a serious if not fatal blow to the ranch industry as it was then conducted. Already there were threats and warnings from Washington.