Ali answered, "For the past two years, I've been here in California."

"_Hmm-ph._ Didn't know they landed any such critters out thisaway."

"They didn't," Ali informed him. "Lieutenant Beale brought twenty-five camels with him when he surveyed the wagon road from Fort Defiance."

"_Wagh!_" Hud Perkins e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "Then 'tis so!"

"What's so?"

"I heard tell of such when I was leavin' Santa Fe to come here," his host informed him. "Some fool, 'twas said, was goin' from Fort Defiance to Californy, usin' camels to lay out a road. Not many believed it. Of them as did, n.o.body thought the camels would get a pistol shot from Fort Defiance."

"It's true," Ali said. "I was with the expedition."

"Well tie that one!" Hud Perkins marveled. "So camels did come to Californy! What happened to 'em?"

Ali had no immediate answer, for after reaching California, nothing worthwhile had happened. The camels had been shown in various places, including Los Angeles, and had attracted the usual onlookers and sparked the usual stampedes. A few months after arriving, Lieutenant Beale took fourteen of the animals and started back along the surveyed road.

The rest of the herd, with Ali as keeper, had been sent to and was still at Fort Tejon, where Army bra.s.s amused itself by putting camels through the usual meaningless paces. Seeing no opportunity for a change, and with all he could stomach of Fort Tejon, Ali had taken Ben Akbar and departed.

Ali answered his host, "They're at Fort Tejon."

Hud Perkins snorted. "Don't blame you for leavin', got no use for Army posts myself. You goin' east?"

"Not all the way," Ali said. "Too far east is no better than too far west. I think I'll go back along the road. I saw a lot of free country there."

Hud Perkins was silent for a long while, then he said quietly, "You saw it two years ago."

"But--" Ali was startled. "It isn't all taken?"

"I don't know," Hud Perkins spoke as a bewildered old man who no longer knew about anything. "Was a time when I figgered the West'd never settle an' a man would always find room. But--Anyhow it's two years since I come out."

Ali asked gravely, "Have there really been so many others?"

His host answered moodily, "I've seen a pa.s.sel of wagon roads opened up.

Whenever there was one, people boiled along it like water pours out of a busted beaver dam."

The specter Ali had seen lurking behind the wagons at Beale's Crossing was again present and again threatened panic.

"Perhaps," he said doubtfully, "I'd better go somewhere else."

"If you can still find such a place," Hud Perkins replied. "Still, like I said, it's two years since I come out. I could be wrong. Why not find out?"

"How?" Ali asked.

"Ride back along the road," Hud Perkins advised him. "See for yourself if it's what you think it is. It's the one way you'll ever know."

Ali said, "I'll do it."

When the leading team of mules swung around the sandy b.u.t.te, Ali turned Ben Akbar away from the road. It was somehow different from the numerous times he'd swung to one side or the other, so that wagons might pa.s.s without the panic that always resulted when livestock met a camel. This time there would be no turning back.

Ali and his mount were swallowed up in a pine forest before anyone saw them. Except for the leading mule team, that spooked when they smelled Ben Akbar's fresh tracks, n.o.body in the whole train suspected that a camel had been here.

Riding due south, Ali did not look around even once. Again he was fleeing, but this time he knew why. At one time, the wagon road had offered everything he wanted. Now it offered nothing.

The wagons lined up and awaiting their turn on the ferry at Beale's Crossing had seemed an overwhelming mult.i.tude only because there had been no basis for comparison. After nineteen days on the wagon road, Ali was able to fit them into their proper niche, one small ripple in a surging tide. He still did not know how this had come about, although he could not have believed unless he saw it. Two short years after the camels had composed the first organized caravan to come this way, everybody seemed to be following.

Besides an endless stream of wagons on the road, there were ranches beside it. The flocks and herds that were sure to come some time seemed to have grown overnight, as though they were mushrooms. There were homes, villages, towns, even the cities that, Ali had once thought, might arise after several generations.

Swimming Ben Akbar across the Colorado at Hud Perkins' house, Ali circled to come back on the road well east of Beale's Crossing--and found more people. Unwilling to believe what became increasingly evident and hoping to find even one place that was as it had been, he rode east.

Hope died when he found a village in the very heart of the desert where the expedition had been lost. The village's source of water was the same water hole from which Ben Akbar had stampeded the Indians. He rode on only to find a better place for leaving the road, and now he had left it.

When he finally halted Ben Akbar and made camp, Ali knew that he had acted wisely. Once again he was at peace, for, even though the old trail was closed, nothing was ever lost as long as a new one beckoned. The next morning, he resumed his southward journey.

The pine forest was long behind him, the desert all about, when Ben Akbar mounted a hill from whose summit Ali finally saw the Gila River.

He dismounted, standing a bit in front of the big _dalul_ and holding the camel's rein lightly as he studied that which he had come so far to see.

Here in the desert, the Gila was sluggish, lazy and silt-laden. It had nothing in common with the clear and sparkling streams that have inspired poet and artist alike, but it belonged in this hot desert, even as the others fitted their rugged valleys. Who could not see beauty in the Gila, could not see.

For no special reason, Ali glanced at the rein in his hand and a vast mortification swept over him. While working for the Army, he had never even thought about certain essential needs because Army pay and rations provided all he needed. Now he had neither, though food was still no problem because everybody in this land was happy to share whatever food he might have. But man could not live by bread alone.

True, not a great deal more was necessary and Ali attached little importance to his own threadbare clothing and battered shoes. But his very soul revolted when he looked at Ben Akbar's worn rein, a sorry thing, unfitted for even the poorest baggage camel. Ali must somehow contrive to earn some money. But the peace that had come to him when he finally turned from the wagon road did not desert him when he remounted.

He had come to the Gila with a plan. He would find and catch the abandoned camels and hire out as packer--and surely packers were needed. All would be well.

Two days later, in a delightful little haven where the Gila periodically overflowed its banks and ample water brought luxurious growth, Ali found the camels. He smiled with happiness when he noted Amir, an old friend from Camp Verde, and two more old acquaintances in a pair of the young Camp Verde females. The herd numbered seven and not five, as Hud Perkins had told him, but Ali remembered that the old man had come this way two years ago. All five camels he'd seen must have been from Camp Verde. Two had been killed by something or other--Hud had mentioned Indians--and the four were Amir's daughters and son.

They watched nervously--and probably would have run if approached by anyone else. Ali, who knew how to converse with camels, advanced slowly, talking as he did so.

Amir himself finally trotted forward to renew old friendship.

Riding Ben Akbar and trailed by his string of camels, there were eleven now, Ali did not look back. The eleven would follow, just as they always followed him. Nor were they at fault because their sorry rewards had never equalled their unswerving devotion and loyalty.

Maybe nothing was really at fault, but the mine owners to whom Ali had offered his services and that of his camels were either too poor to hire any packer; or so rich that they might hire what they chose, and they chose mules. There was no use in going even near the ranches, camels terrified cattle, too. Finally, reduced to packing water, Ali found that those whose need was most desperate were almost never able to pay.

Unable to go on because of maximum expense and minimum income, Ali must now do the best he could for his baggage animals.

When he came to the meadow on the Gila where he had found the original seven, he led his herd far into it. Then, still not looking behind, he whirled Ben Akbar and was off at top speed. Though they would still try to follow, the baggage camels could not match Ben Akbar's speed for very long and must soon fall behind.

There must be another journey along a new trail. Ben Akbar's rein was no longer even a rein, but a piece of rope found at a water hole. His saddle was falling apart and Ali must do something, but this time he would.

He had heard of much gold in the northern desert.

13. Reunion

The village of Quartzite was never calculated to overwhelm with metropolitan sweep or impress with architectural grandeur. Completely surrounded by the Arizona desert, sometimes it was oddly like a captive village, a prisoner of the desert. But in a very real sense Quartzite was a true monument, a tribute to the human beings who first had the courage to trespa.s.s in such a forbidding land and then dared build homes and live there.