When he came to the California bank of the Colorado River, Ali halted Ben Akbar and surrendered to complete astonishment. Reason told him he had been this way before, but so drastic were the changes and so little was as he remembered it, that he challenged reason itself. Ali took a deep breath and tried vainly to assure himself that this really was Beale's Crossing where, two years ago and fifty days out of Fort Defiance, the expedition's work had been successfully completed.

Ali and Lieutenant Beale, on Ben Akbar and Sied, had reached the river on the seventeenth of October. They were met by a horde of Indians, all of whom were so deliriously excited at their first sight of camels that any English they might have known was submerged in the shock. Two days later, Ali had proved that camels can swim by swimming Ben Akbar across the Colorado. The rest of the expedition had followed. Some horses and mules, which the Indians promptly retrieved and ate, were drowned. All the camels had crossed safely.

Ali's dazed mind strove to reconcile that scene of the past and this one.

On the opposite bank, where the Indians had grown their corn and melons, covered wagons with canvas tops that billowed in the little wind that stirred were lined up as far as the eye could see. Horses, mules and oxen rested in the traces while awaiting their turn on a ferry that was presently in mid-river, its cargo a wagon and a six-mule team. Adults gossiped and children played about the waiting wagons. There was a barking of dogs, a cackling of fowl, a lowing of cattle, all the noises that accompany a nation on the march.

Transfixed, Ali could not move. Then the spell that gripped him was broken by a shout.

"Hey you! Move that blasted camel!"

Glancing toward the ferry, Ali saw the six mules dancing skittishly and two men trying to quiet them. Ali moved downriver. In some ways, all had changed and in some, nothing had; camels still panicked livestock.

Presently, Ali halted and turned back to watch, appalled by this monster that he had somehow helped to spawn. The road had seemed a good thing, but all the people who would ever use it, or so Ali thought, were not half as many as the multitude awaiting the ferry.

For a while he sat entranced as a wild deer that cannot turn its eyes from some fascinating thing, then his flight was sudden as the deer's when the intriguing but unknown object is abruptly recognized as a dreaded enemy. Wheeling Ben Akbar, Ali rode downriver at top speed. He did not dare look around, and he did not think of slackening the pace until even Ben Akbar could no longer maintain it and slowed of his own accord. Instantly contrite, Ali drew his mount to a halt.

"I'm sorry, oh brother, that I could let you run so far and fast," he apologized. "Great fear stole my senses. Perhaps I am becoming craven."

The panting Ben Akbar nosed his arm and accepted and ate a lump of sugar. Ali dared look back up the river. He heaved a mighty sigh of relief.

Not only had Ben Akbar run far beyond the sight of any wagons, but far beyond hearing. Here was only the peaceful river, its tule-lined banks disturbed by nothing except a horde of waterfowl and an occasional ripple that marked the wake of a great fish hunting smaller ones in the shallows.

Ali grinned sheepishly. Certainly there had been no real danger; he had fled from shadows. Tongues would wag along many caravan routes if it were known that Hadji Ali had run away from nothing. Just the same, Ali liked this better. He decided to ride farther down the riverbank before crossing.

The farther he went, the lonelier it became and the better he liked it. Presently, his wild flight seemed more amusing than otherwise, and Ali chuckled throatily, but he had no thought of going back up the river. He rounded a bend and saw a dwelling.

Built of driftwood and roofed with adobe, it was a one-room affair. Glassless windows had been cut in such a manner as to admit the morning sun. An adobe fireplace was built against an outside wall and an adobe chimney rose a little above the flat roof.

Ali halted Ben Akbar. He was no longer afraid. There had never been anything about such houses to frighten him. However, if there was any livestock about, he would avoid argument by circling around. If not, it was safe to go directly past.

Then a man came from the house and hailed him, "Come on, stranger! Come on an' light!"

Ali rode ahead to meet a wiry, fierce-eyed man whose uncut hair and long beard were snow-white, but who fought the advancing years as furiously as he had once battled advancing Indians. Everything about him, from his buckskins to the way he had built his house, marked him for what he was. Here was one of the wild men, who had gone where he wished and done as he pleased, and never fretted about anything if he had a gun in his hands and a knife at his belt. Grown too old for such a life, he had chosen to spend the rest of his days here in this isolated spot.

Ali dismounted and the old man extended his hand. "I'm Hud Perkins an' you're welcome."

"I'm Hi Jolly." Ali gave the Americanized version of his name.

Hud Perkins said, "I looked out an' saw a man comin' on a camel, I couldn't believe it! Of course, lots of men come, hardly a week passes but what somebody goes up or down river, but not on camels. Is he tame?"

"Tamer than he was at one time," Ali answered. "He has been among so many people that almost anybody can pet him now."

Hud Perkins said, "Don't know as I'd hold with pettin' him, but such a critter sure makes a man think. On my way out here, I run across a passel of 'em."

Ali's interest quickened. "You did? Where?"

"On the Heely River," Hud Perkins stated, "an' there wasn't rightly a passel. There was five, but five such critters look like a passel. Will yours stay about or do you picket him?"

"He'll stay."

"Then take his gear off an' let him fill up. Plenty of grass hereabouts an' nary a critter to eat it most times."

Ali removed Ben Akbar's saddle and bridle and the big dalul padded out to forage. Intrigued by his host's reference to five camels on the Heely River, Ali straightened to ask for more information and found Hud Perkins staring at Ben Akbar.

He turned to Ali. "What's wrong with him?"

"What do you mean?"

"Is he good's a horse or mule?"

"Much better," Ali stated.

The old man shook a puzzled head. "That don't hardly jibe with those camels on the Heely. Wasn't nobody payin' them no mind, 'cept some heathen Papagoes that was fixin' to eat 'em. I was tempted to ketch one an' see how it rode, but a cowboy said they wasn't worth ketchin'. The Army fetched 'em from some place in Texas, he said, an' turned 'em loose on the Heely on account they was more fuss than worth."

Ali's heart sank at this first news in more than two years of the camels left behind at Camp Verde, but he told himself that he should have expected nothing else. He drew some comfort from a quick assurance that neither Mimico nor Major Wayne could possibly have accompanied any expedition that would abandon camels. Whoever had loosed those five in the Arizona desert, where they would certainly find conditions to their liking, knew nothing of camels and cared less.

Ali said, "Who left those camels did not know what he was doing."

"Might be I ought to have caught me one anyway, eh?"

"You'd have found it worth your while," Ali assured him.

"Well, I didn't an' I don't know as it would of been doin' me or the camel any favor if I did. Ridin' anythin' don't set like it used to. Come on in, Hi. I'll rouse up some rations."

Ali walked with the old man to his house and sat down on a wooden bench while Hud Perkins busied himself preparing fish from the river and vegetables from his garden. He queried, "If I might ask, where ye been?"

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 ejaculated. "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, nobody 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 brass 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 passel 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 butte, 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 pass 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, nobody 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 multitude 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.