A strange man came out by the road gate; no doubt,
the new proprietor. Presley turned away, hurrying northwards along the
County Road by the mammoth watering-tank and the long wind-break of
poplars.

He came to Caraher's place. There was no change here. The saloon had
weathered the storm, indispensable to the new as well as to the old
regime. The same dusty buggies and buckboards were tied under the shed,
and as Presley hurried by he could distinguish Caraher's voice, loud as
ever, still proclaiming his creed of annihilation.

Bonneville Presley avoided. He had no associations with the town. He
turned aside from the road, and crossing the northwest corner of Los
Muertos and the line of the railroad, turned back along the Upper Road
till he came to the Long Trestle and Annixter's,--Silence, desolation,
abandonment.

A vast stillness, profound, unbroken, brooded low over all the place. No
living thing stirred. The rusted wind-mill on the skeleton-like tower of
the artesian well was motionless; the great barn empty; the windows of
the ranch house, cook house, and dairy boarded up. Nailed upon a tree
near the broken gateway was a board, white painted, with stencilled
letters, bearing the inscription:

"Warning. ALL PERSONS FOUND TRESPASSING ON THESE PREMISES WILL BE
PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW. By order P. and S. W. R.
R."

As he had planned, Presley reached the hills by the head waters of
Broderson's Creek late in the afternoon. Toilfully he climbed them,
reached the highest crest, and turning about, looked long and for the
last time at all the reach of the valley unrolled beneath him. The land
of the ranches opened out forever and forever under the stimulus of that
measureless range of vision. The whole gigantic sweep of the San Joaquin
expanded Titanic before the eye of the mind, flagellated with heat,
quivering and shimmering under the sun's red eye. It was the season
after the harvest, and the great earth, the mother, after its period of
reproduction, its pains of labour, delivered of the fruit of its loins,
slept the sleep of exhaustion in the infinite repose of the colossus,
benignant, eternal, strong, the nourisher of nations, the feeder of an
entire world.

And as Presley looked there came to him strong and true the sense and
the significance of all the enigma of growth. He seemed for one
instant to touch the explanation of existence. Men were nothings, mere
animalculae, mere ephemerides tha