Question

Read the following passage carefully:

The dust of the Southern Pacific yard lay thick over the counter of Miller’s Emporium, a fine, alkaline silt that resisted both the broom and the damp cloth. Outside, the town of Benson, Arizona, was less an established settlement and more an argument between the desert sun and the pine boards of the new saloons. Every train from the east brought a fresh cargo of dreamers, each carrying a silver-plated pocket watch and a trunk full of wool suits that would rot before the year was out.

Inside the dim mercantile, Samuel sorted the brass scales with a deliberate, slow friction, rubbing each weight against his sleeve. The town’s frantic rhythm—the sudden gunshots of land speculators, the rattle of the ore carts from the Tombstone hills—seemed to stop at his threshold. To the newcomers, the desert was a void to be filled with iron rails and brick facades. But Samuel, who had watched three dry seasons wither the scrub oaks to grey dust, valued only what could endure the heat. He refused to stock the cheap, gilded mirrors or the velvet waistcoats that the railroad men clamored for, filling his shelves instead with iron spikes, dry beans, and heavy canvas. When a young clerk suggested they order the new patent linoleum to cover the splintered pine floor, Samuel merely gestured to the open doorway, where the wind was already sweeping another red ridge of dust across the threshold. "Why paint a house built on sand?" he murmured.

In the passage, how does the contrast between the transient boomtown setting and the harsh desert environment influence Samuel's core values?