a rock they are on the alert, and looking " forty ways at the same time,” to make sure that I am not creeping up on them from some other direction.  Fate, however, has decreed that I am not to sleep out to-night — not quite out.  A lone shanty looms up through the gathering darkness, and I immediately turn my footsteps thitherwise.  I find it occupied.  I am all right now for the night.  Hold on, though! not so fast.  “There is many a slip,” etc.  The little shanty, with a few acres of rather rocky ground, on the bank of the Truckee, is presided over by a lonely bachelor of German extraction, who eyes me with evident suspicion, as, leaning on my bicycle in front of his rude cabin door I ask to be accommodated for the night.  Were it a man on horseback, or a man with a team, this hermit-like rancher could satisfy himself to some extent as to the character of his visitor, for he sees men on horseback or men in wagons, on an average, perhaps, once a week during the summer, and can see plenty of them any day by going to Reno.  But me and the bicycle he cannot “size up” so readily.  He never saw the like of us before, and we are beyond his Teutonic frontier-like comprehension.  He gives us up; he fails to solve the puzzle; he knows not how to unravel the mystery; and, with characteristic Teutonic bluntness, he advises us to push on through fifteen miles of rocks, sand, and darkness, to Wadsworth.  The prospect of worrying my way, hungry and weary, through fifteen miles of rough, unknown country, after dark, looms up as rather a formidable task.  So summoning my reserve stock of persuasive eloquence, backed up by sundry significant movements, such as setting the bicycle up against his cabin-wall, and sitting down on a block of wood under the window, I finally prevail upon him to accommodate me with a blanket on the floor of the shanty.  He has just finished supper, and the remnants of the frugal repast are still on the table; but he says nothing about any supper for me:  he scarcely feels satisfied with himself yet:  he feels that I have, in some mysterious manner, gained an unfair advantage over him, and obtained a foothold in his shanty against his own wish-jumped his claim, so to speak.  Not that I think the man really inhospitable at heart; but he has been so habitually alone, away from his fellowmen so much, that the presence of a stranger in his cabin makes him feel uneasy; and when that stranger is accompanied by a queer-looking piece of machinery that cannot stand alone, but which he nevertheless says he rides on, our lonely rancher is perhaps not so much to be wondered at, after all, for his absent-mindedness in regard to my supper.  His mind is occupied with other thoughts.  “You couldn’t accommodate a fellow with a bite to eat, could you.”  I timidly venture, after devouring what eatables are in sight, over and over again, with my eyes.  “I have plenty of money to pay for any accommodation I get,” I think it policy to add, by way of