Crossword-Solution: CYCLER 6 letters, 10 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 13

Soon after leaving San Pablo the country gets somewhat "choppy," and the road a succession of short-hills, at the bottom of which modest-looking mud-holes patiently await an opportunity to make one's acquaintance, or scraggy-looking, latitudinous washouts are awaiting their chance to commit a murder, or to make the unwary cycler who should venture to "coast," think he had wheeled over the tail of an earthquake.

One never minds a hilly road where one can reach the bottom with an impetus that sends him spinning half-way up the next; but where mud-holes or washouts resolutely "hold the fort" in every depression, it is different, and the progress of the cycler is necessarily slow.

The engineer of an approaching train sets his locomotive to tooting for all she is worth as he sees a "strayed or stolen" cycler, slowly bumping along ahead of his train.

Before reaching Auburn I pass through "Bloomer Cut," where perpendicular walls of bowlders loom up on both sides of the track looking as if the slightest touch or jar would unloose them and send them bounding and crashing on the top of the passing train as it glides along, or drop down on the stray cycler who might venture through.

The blazing sun casts, with startling vividness on the smooth white alkali, that awful scraggy, straggling shadow that, like a vengeful fate, always accompanies the cycler on a sunny day, and which is the bane of a sensitive wheelman's life.