“Tell me about yourself and your people,” he said, and Donna told him the story with which the reader is already familiar. He questioned her carefully about Sam Singer and the man who had murdered her father and despoiled him of his fortune. “Who was this tenderfoot person?” he asked. “Didn't Sam Singer know his name?” “No. We never knew the man's name. When my father left for the desert he merely told mother that he was going to meet an Eastern capitalist at Salton. Sam says the only name my father called the man was Boston.” “Boston?” Donna nodded. “That means he hailed from Boston, and your father called him that in sheer contempt. No wonder they fought.” He was silent, thinking over that strange tale of a lost mine which Sam Singer had told Donna's mother. “Well, I'm not going to keep on desert ratting until somebody cracks me on the head and stows me on the shelf” he said presently. He waved his arm toward the north. “Away up there, a hundred and fifty miles, I've cast my fortune--in the desert of Owens river valley. I've cut out for myself a job that will last me all my life, and win or lose, I'll fight the fight to a finish. I'm going to make thirty-two thousand acres of barren waste bloom and furnish clean, unsullied wealth for a few thousand poor, crushed devils that have been slaughtered and maimed under the Juggernaut of our Christian civilization. I'm going to plant them on ten-acre farms up there under the shadow of old Mt. Kearsarge, and convert them into Pagans. I'm going to create an Eden out of an abandoned Hell. I'm going to lay out a townsite and men will build me a town, so I can light it with my own electricity. It's a big Utopian dream, Donna dear, but what a crowning glory to the dreamer's life if it only comes true! Just think, Donna. A few thousand of the poor and lowly and hopeless brought out of the cities and given land and a chance for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; to know that their toil will bring them some return, that they can have a home and a hope for the future. That's what I want to do, and when that job is accomplished I will have lived my life and enjoyed it; when I pass away, I want them to bury me in Donnaville--that's to be the name of my colony--and for an epitaph I'd like Robert Louis Stevenson's “Requiem”: Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie, Glad did I live and gladly die And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me; Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.”