"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.