A few miles from the Chinese shanty I pass a party of Indians camped by
the side of my road. They are squatting around the smouldering embers
of a sage-brush fire, sleeping and dozing. I am riding slowly and carefully
along the road that happens to be ridable just here, and am fairly past
them before being seen. As I gradually vanish in the moonlit air I wonder
what they think it was - that strange-looking object that so silently and
mysteriously glided past. It is safe to warrant they think me anything
but flesh and blood, as they rouse each other and peer at my shadowy
form disappearing in the dim distance.

>From Battle Mountain my route leads across a low alkali bottom, through
which dozens of small streams are flowing to the Humboldt. Many of them
are narrow enough to be jumped, but not with a bicycle on one's shoulder,
for under such conditions there is always a disagreeable uncertainty
that one may disastrously alight before he gets ready. But I am getting
tired of partially undressing to ford streams that are little more than
ditches, every little way, and so I hit upon the novel plan of using the
machine for a vaulting-pole. Beaching it out into the centre of the
stream, I place one hand on the head and the other on the saddle, and
vault over, retaining my hold as I alight on the opposite shore. Pulling
the bicycle out after me, the thing is done. There is no telling to what
uses this two-wheeled "creature" could be put in case of necessity.
Certainly the inventor never expected it to be used for a vaulting-pole
in leaping across streams. Twenty-five miles east of Battle Mountain the
valley of the Humboldt widens into a plain of some size, through which
the river meanders with many a horseshoe curve, and maps out the pot-hooks
and hangers of our childhood days in mazy profusion. Amid these innumerable
curves and counter-curves, clumps of willows and tall blue-joint reeds