ivide of the Santa Lucia range, and went speeding through the
beautiful Santa Marguerite valley with its carpet of green, enlivened
with splashes of yellow from the wild mustard blossoms. Across the
swift flowing ford of the Salinis river, through deep ravines and
mountain gorges, and over miles and miles of sun-baked sand and dreary
waste of stunted cactus and sagebrush, the horses sped.

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 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 ca