“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.”
He paused, a little flushed and exalted. Never before had Bob McGraw unburdened his heart of its innermost secrets, its hopes, its fears, its aspirations; for a moment now he almost quivered at the thought that Donna would look upon him as a dreamer, an idealist—perhaps a fool—he, a penniless desert wanderer assuming to hold in his sunburnt palm the destinies of the under dogs of civilization—the cripples too weak and hopeless to be anything more than wretched camp-followers in the Army of Labor.
He glanced down at her now, half expecting, dreading to meet, the look of gentle indulgence so common to the Unbeliever. But there was no patronizing smile, no tolerant note in her voice as she asked simply:
“And this great, beautiful Utopia of yours, Bob—what did you call it?”
“It doesn't exist yet,” he explained hastily, “but it—it may. And when it does become a reality, I'm going to call it Donnaville.”
“Why?”