un to set, everything in the range of his
vision was overlaid with a sheen of gold.

First, close at hand, it was the Seed ranch, carpeting the little hollow
behind the Mission with a spread of greens, some dark, some vivid,
some pale almost to yellowness. Beyond that was the Mission itself,
its venerable campanile, in whose arches hung the Spanish King's bells,
already glowing ruddy in the sunset. Farther on, he could make out
Annixter's ranch house, marked by the skeleton-like tower of the
artesian well, and, a little farther to the east, the huddled, tiled
roofs of Guadalajara. Far to the west and north, he saw Bonneville very
plain, and the dome of the courthouse, a purple silhouette against the
glare of the sky. Other points detached themselves, swimming in a golden
mist, projecting blue shadows far before them; the mammoth live-oak by
Hooven's, towering superb and magnificent; the line of eucalyptus trees,
behind which he knew was the Los Muertos ranch house--his home; the
watering-tank, the great iron-hooped tower of wood that stood at the
joining of the Lower Road and the County Road; the long wind-break of
poplar trees and the white walls of Caraher's saloon on the County Road.

But all this seemed to be only foreground, a mere array of
accessories--a mass of irrelevant details. Beyond Annixter's, beyond
Guadalajara, beyond the Lower Road, beyond Broderson Creek, on to the
south and west, infinite, illimitable, stretching out there under the
sheen of the sunset forever and forever, flat, vast, unbroken, a huge
scroll, unrolling between the horizons, spread the great stretches of
the ranch of Los Muertos, bare of crops, shaved close in the recent
harvest. Near at hand were hills, but on that far southern horizon only
the curve of the great earth itself checked the view. Adjoining Los
Muertos, and widening to the west, opened the Broderson ranch. The
Osterman ranch to the northwest carried on the great sweep of landscape;
ranch after ranch. Then, as the imagination itself expanded under the
stimulus of that measureless range of vision, even those great ranches
resolved themselves into mere foreground, mere accessories, irrelevant
details. Beyond the fine line of the horizons, over the curve of the
globe, the shoulder of the earth, were other ranches, equally vast, and
beyond these, others, and beyond these, still others, the immensities
multiplying, lengthening out vaster and vaster. The whole gigantic
sweep of