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."