So through the hot afternoon they sat together in the preacher’s little home, the one occupied house in the town, while he dilated on his dream; and as the day grew cool, they walked together by the banks of the tepid stream and looked at the deserted houses and the blaze of the sun behind the flat-topped mountain. The boy who had sat so far forward and given such apparent attention to the sermon walked out with them. Absorbed in studying the personality of the preacher, Clayton gave the silent boy little attention. As the sun slipped down behind the mountain, throwing pleasant shadows across the valley, Clayton took his horse from the preacher’s stable and set out for a ride. And as he went the preacher stood in his doorway, smiling and dreaming his dream. From his boyhood, Peter Wingate had been a dreamer. In his college days the zeal of the missionary was infused into his veins, and the Far West, which he pictured as a rough land filled with rough and Godless men, drew him. He had found it poorer than the East, more direct and simple, more serious and sincere, but not Godless. And he had come to love it. It was a hopeful, toiling land, rough perhaps, but as yet unspoiled. Then a day came which brought a new interest into his life. A youth climbed down from a white-topped prairie schooner with a bundle in his arms and entered the preacher’s house. The bundle held a baby, whose mother had died in the white-topped wagon. As the youth, who was almost a man in stature, but still a boy in years, told the story of the child, and placed in Wingate’s hands its few belongings, he spoke of Paradise. At first the spiritual-minded minister thought he referred to spiritual things, then understood that he was speaking of a new town, situated in a wonderful valley that widened down from the mountains. Thenceforth, though the child had not come from this new town, this new town and its promise became linked in the minister’s mind with the child; and by and by he journeyed to it, when the boy was well-grown and sturdy and the town had been caught up suddenly in the whirl of a wild boom. He began to preach in the new school house, and organized a new church; and soon the fiery earnestness and optimism of the boom was infused into his heart, supplementing the zeal of the missionary. He no longer saw Paradise as it was, but as he wished it to be. The very name allured him. He had long preached of a spiritual Paradise; here was the germ of an earthly one. From rim to rim, from mountain to mesa, it was, to his eyes, a favored valley, fitted for happy homes. The town vanished, and the settlers departed, but the dream remained. The dreamer still saw the possibilities and the beauties—the fruitful soil, the sun-kissed grassy slopes, the alluring blue mountains. And the dream was associated with the child; the dreamer, the dream, and the child, were as one, for had not the child brought to the dreamer his first knowledge of this smiling land?