That meeting with J. Ross Clark bore fruit for me, though—and it was the means of holding up the Los Angeles Limited for an hour, as well. Several years later I had an important engagement at Goodsprings and was delayed seven hours in Pueblo on the way out there, owing to a change in time of the Denver & Rio Grande trains. The best I could do then was to arrive in Salt Lake five minutes after the Limited’s leaving time, at one o’clock at night, with depots a mile apart. Failure to keep my appointment at Goodsprings would mean disappointment to others and a money loss to me, as well as a wasted trip. In desperation, I went to the up-town office of the Denver & Rio Grande, and asked the agent there to try to have the Los Angeles train held for me at Salt Lake. Nothing doing. That important personage swelled up to full capacity and said, “Evidently, if the San Pedro people wanted to neighbor with my Company they would change their leaving time.”
Next, I asked the conductor on the Rio Grande train to wire ahead for me—and I am happy to state he was a gentleman. Also he was a one-time miner. “Tried it once over at Aspen,” he told me. And right away there was a bond of sympathy, or something, between us. That conductor really wanted to help me. But, as he told me he had wired the San Pedro people several times without results, I had to think of some other way, for I wanted to make that Limited as a lost soul wants to make Paradise.
It was then I thought of J. Ross Clark. What was the good of making friends, if you could not use them? The Rio Grande conductor obligingly held his train for me at Green River, Utah, while I filed a message to the Superintendent of the San Pedro lines. We arrived in Salt Lake ten minutes ahead of time, and the conductor, pointing to a hack-stand, said to me, “Now hurry—the Los Angeles train may be a little late in getting away.”
At the San Pedro station I found the Limited all steamed up, ready to go—and I boarded it quickly, all out of breath. But there was no need for hurrying. Presently the conductor came along and asked me: “Did you come in on Rio Grande Three?” I told him I did. Then he asked, “First or second section?” I admitted that I didn’t know the train had been split up at Grand Junction. The conductor, wanting to be sure of his order, drew a yellow slip from his pocket, and re-read: “Hold for one or more passengers off Rio Grande Three.” He then said, “Yes, that’s it. I’m sure you are the man I’m holding for—but I’ll have to wait for the second section.” And it was an hour late.
I think perhaps Ross had put in his order the words “one or more” solely as a precaution against the possibility of being accused of showing partiality to his mining neighbor, in breaking rules. Anyway, J. Ross Clark had no call for worry. His brother, William A. Clark, a mining man, controlling, among other holdings, the fabulously rich United Verde mine at Jerome, Arizona, owned also forty-nine per cent of the San Pedro lines—and was at this time operating the road under a twenty-year control agreement. It is now in full control of the Union Pacific.
The Limited was not scheduled to stop at Jean, Nevada, my destination. The regular procedure would have been for me to go on down the line forty miles or more and then double back on a local train. But when the Limited began slowing down on approaching Jean, the conductor said to me, “No, don’t jump—wait ‘till she stops.”
The engineer climbed down from his cab. The conductor hopped off the train and yelled, “Hey, Bill, what’s wrong?” I knew what was wrong. And Bill knew; and the conductor knew; and possibly one other knew—but that was all. And whose business was it, anyway?
The lost hour had been made up before the train pulled into Caliente, Nevada, where it halted ten minutes. And, paradoxically, it gained another hour there in that ten minutes. Caliente—Mexican for hot—is where Pacific time begins.
Bill had left that division point “on time” and held to the fast schedule all the way. And I’ll bet Bill and his relief engineer landed the old Limited in Los Angeles on the dot — even though there were miles and miles of desert wasteland, with two high mountain ranges, and, finally, a beautiful irrigated valley with orange groves and banks and banks of rose.s, yet to be crossed.
As the Limited started to move again the conductor threw me a last cheerful word: “You’ll have only a little way to walk.” And I could only hope that there was no one to report that conductor—nor my friend Ross.