The scorched winds of the desert caught up the sands and hurled them hot into their faces and stung them like tiny sparks.
Dripping with foam the horses were reined up at the depot platform in just five hours and fifty minutes from the time of starting––a record that stands in San Louis Obispo today as the best ever made, and that too by a big-hearted western man who did it only to aid a woman in distress.
The train sped over miles of brown and parched desert, studded with a growth of palms that rattled in the sultry wind like dried sunflower stalks. The scenes were scarcely noticed by Hattie as she sat in the coach busied with her own thoughts. The train was an express but it seemed to her 226 to creep along. The rumble of the wheels clanking on the iron rails seemed to say: “You’ll be too late, you’ll be too late.”
At Sacramento there was a wait of four hours for the east bound express, and Hattie sat in the depot where she could watch the clock, tick, tock, tick, tock––swinging the pendulum in these moments of suspense and waiting. Those monotonous sounds persistently repeated the single theme, seconds were born and ushered into eternity with the slow swing of the pendulum; every tick brought the time of starting nearer, but the pendulum swung so slow.
Those four hours watching the clock were the most tedious of her life. When the time was drawing nigh and the waiting passengers were stirring about, the man in the ticket office came out and wrote upon the blackboard, “East bound Express two hours late.”
Again the slow swinging pendulum sent a torrent of woe to the unhappy girl, and when the train rolled into the yards she felt as though she had lived within sound of that clock for a year.
The green valley changed to the red earth of the foothills, still showing signs of the gold hunters of 1849. The puffing and wheezing of the engine told they were climbing steep grades, and soon they were in the snows of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The train entered the forty-two mile snow shed and when half way through struck a hand car, derailing the engine.
It was day without, but dark within the sheds. A kindly woman with her daughter occupied the berth opposite Hattie. She noticed the troubled look on the girl’s face and from that time on until they separated at Cheyenne, did everything she could to make the journey pleasant. But there was the ever present suspense and doubt.
It was ten hours before the train was again under way, but they had lost the right of way on the road and were compelled to make frequent stops on the sidings to allow other trains to pass.