Hi Jolly! Part 9

The camels had not detected this fresh peril and were not directly aware of it, but the screams of the horses and shouts of the driver were evidence enough that it existed. The camels responded as though they were part of a caravan under attack. Whatever peril lurked, it might pa.s.s them by if they stood quietly.

The herd again tractable, Ali put a companionable hand on Ben Akbar's shoulder and turned toward the pier. His eyes widened in astonishment.

Mimico had received and was holding the tether rope of the single beast that had been transferred to the pier. It was one of the young females, and, like all the rest of the herd, it was standing very quietly. But on the pier and within a wide radius, Mimico and the young camel seemed to be the only living creatures that were quiet.

The terrified horses, bereft of all reason, had wrenched control from their driver. Whirling crazily, they had missed dashing off the pier and into the water by no more than a wagon wheel's width. Now, with the red-haired driver still trying with all his strength to stop them, they were running away at top speed. As Ali watched, a wheel struck a boulder and the wagon bounded high in the air.

To one side, a black-bearded man had been indolently sitting on a gaunt dun mule, with one foot in a stirrup and the other c.o.c.ked up on the saddle, while his chin rested on the upraised knee. Suddenly and obviously to the man's complete surprise--the mule began an insane bucking. The startled rider dropped his upraised foot, groped for and couldn't find the stirrup, and missed the dangling reins when he s.n.a.t.c.hed at them. He leaned forward to wrap both arms about the mule's neck and clung desperately.

Two saddled horses whose riders were among the crowd reared and danced in a mad effort to break their tethers. A horse that had not been picketed whirled and, tail high over its rump, galloped away. Everybody on sh.o.r.e except Mimico seemed to be shouting or screaming, or shouting and screaming.

A small boat moved up beside the lighter and more men came aboard. Four were native camel handlers but the fifth was a quiet young American named, Ali remembered, Gwynne Heap. With a taste for adventure and a knowledge of Eastern languages and customs derived from previous residence in the East, Heap had contributed at least as much as anyone else to the successful purchase and importation of the camel herd. Now he took competent command.

"You have no trouble?" he asked quietly.

"No trouble," Ali told him.

Gwynne Heap called to Lieutenant Porter, who had remained in the small boat, "Everything's under control."

"Keep them coming," Lieutenant Porter called back. "They must be unloaded."

Lieutenant Porter and the men who remained with him joined Mimico and made ready to help receive the camels. Ali began to harness the next animal scheduled for unloading.

He became absorbed in what he was doing, adjusting each strap and fastening each buckle with a fussy attention to detail that was both unnecessary and so time-consuming that it drew reprimanding glances from Gwynne Heap. Ali refused either to hurry or to look toward the sh.o.r.e, but refusing to turn his eyes toward it in no way obliterated the ugly thing that awaited there. The resentful crowd was still in an uproar.

Ali thought sadly of the joyous welcome his imagination had created for these camels, so vital to his own country, when they finally reached America.

The harnessed camel was finally swung away on the boom, and, still refusing to glance sh.o.r.eward, Ali began to help prepare the next in line. He tried to console himself with the thought that Lieutenant Porter was still in command and n.o.body would dare challenge him, but in his heart he knew that it was not so. If camels were not wanted in America, they could not be here. n.o.body could force their acceptance.

Then, as always when facing a problem that seemed to have no solution, Ali stopped thinking about it. He knew from experience that it was not wise to borrow trouble. The rising sun shone on not just one but many different paths that led in many different directions. One could always find the right way if he was properly diligent in the search.

One by one, the camels were landed until only Ben Akbar was left. Ali finally glanced sh.o.r.eward, to discover that Lieutenant Porter and his men had rigged a picket line, a long rope stretched across the pier, and they were tethering the camels to it as they were lowered and unharnessed. Ali saw also that the herd was again becoming restless, but this time there was no cause for concern.

The crowd was still in an uproar and such horses as had not already broken away were trying their best to do so. The camels had definitely decided that whatever might be bothering everything else would not disturb them. However, after many weeks at sea, at last they were once again on firm footing. That was very exciting.

His companions stood back while Ali alone harnessed Ben Akbar, then took hold of the boom and rode with him as the great _dalul_ was transferred from the lighter to the pier. He saw, even as he descended, that the tethered camels were fast becoming unmanageable. They both smelled and saw the earth that lay just beyond the pier and they were frantic to feel it. For all his skill, not even Mimico would be able to maintain control much longer.

The spectators--those with horses had wisely left them behind--had come nearer and were arranged in a rough U at the end of the pier and on either side. Lieutenant Porter, who looked more worried than he had during the stormiest part of the voyage, paced nervously back and forth. Again and again he searched the crowd, as though expecting to find someone who should be present but was not.

Keeping a firm grip on Ben Akbar's lead rope, because he knew that big _dalul_ was as anxious as any of the rest to feel earth under his feet, Ali turned to study the crowd, too. Except for a group distinguished by their uniforms, and further marked as soldiers by their arms and precise formation, he learned nothing except that Americans wear outlandish clothes.

Gwynne Heap came onto the pier and Porter asked anxiously, "Will you see if you can find Wayne? He should have met us."

"Right," the other a.s.sented.

Gwynne Heap walked to the end of the pier and mingled with the crowd. A second after he disappeared, Ben Akbar shivered convulsively and Ali knew what to expect.

"I know you long to feel the earth, for I have a similar yearning," he said. "But wait until the time is here and the word is spoken. Do not break and run as a half-trained baggage camel might. Do not shame me, my brother."

Ben Akbar quieted, but the rest of the camels would not be soothed. They surged forward, and there was no way to know which one broke the picket line because all were lunging. Tether ropes slipped off either end of the broken line as the herd ran forward.

Maintaining a firm grip on Ben Akbar's tether rope and keeping pace with the _dalul_, Ali ran with them. He was not worried. This was no reasonless stampede that might be expected to overrun whatever lay in its path because fear-crazed camels would take no reckoning of obstacles. These camels were running for the same reason that a young horse runs when, after a winter spent in a confining stall, it is finally freed in a green pasture. The people on the pier were in no danger.

The spectators, however, thought otherwise. Most of them were thoroughly familiar with horses and mules, but camels were as alien as dinosaurs.

Obviously, these berserk beasts were bent on destruction.

A man shouted in fear and the contagion spread. Those directly in the path of the running herd surged away, crowding those on either side and compounding the confusion. Some idiot, fortunately he was too excited to take proper aim, drew and fired a revolver. Then Ali's eyes widened in horror.

Through the gap left open when the crowd parted, the soldiers came on the run. Their arms were ready. Their obvious intention was to avert catastrophe by shooting the camels before they overran the crowd. Ali heard Lieutenant Porter's outraged bellow.

"No! No, you fools!"

If they heard the command, the soldiers ignored it. Dispersing smartly, those in front knelt and those behind were preparing to shoot over their heads when a newcomer appeared.

Riding a sleek black horse which he handled so skillfully that somehow it seemed an extension of himself, he came through the same gap the soldiers had used. Unmistakably a professional soldier, his present actions proclaimed that he was accustomed to emergencies. He wheeled his horse in front of the troops and snapped an order.

Though they had ignored Lieutenant Porter, either because they hadn't heard him or because Porter wore the Navy uniform, the soldiers gave this officer instant obedience. Falling back to either side, they formed a lane that let the running camels through but kept the spectators out.

Seconds after the run started, Ali and Ben Akbar left the pier and stood on the soil of America.

Back on the pier, Lieutenant Porter heaved a mighty sigh of relief. He gave formal command of the camel herd over to Major Henry Wayne, of the United States Army. Arriving in the nick of time, Wayne's prompt and vigorous action averted the ma.s.sacre of these animals and insured establishment of the most colorful and most unique method of transportation ever attempted in the United States--the Camel Corps.

At the very rear of the caravan, where he had been posted by Major Wayne so that he might keep a watchful eye on all the other camels, a puzzled and apprehensive Ali sat lightly in Ben Akbar's saddle. Watching the caravan, only forty-one animals in all, imposed no strain. From Yusuf, the belled leader who swung along as placidly as though the seven hundred and fifty pounds he bore on his pack saddle had no weight at all, to Iba, the little female who walked just ahead of Ben Akbar and had been relieved of all pack-carrying because of antic.i.p.ated motherhood, none had any rebellious ideas or any inclination to do anything except walk along until they came to their destination.

Ali saw them as one learns to see the very familiar. With no need for the fussy solicitude and anxious fretting that marked the soldiers a.s.signed to duty with the camels, he would instantly discern any departure from the normal and immediately thereafter he would be making the proper countermove. Not required even to think about the camels, Ali's thoughts were occupied by more troublesome matters.

In this America, to which camels had been brought with so much trouble and at such vast expense, they had been granted a hostile reception and, with very few exceptions, there had been nothing but hostility since.

Even those who came only to stare--and throngs of the curious appeared wherever the camels were taken--did not like what they saw.

It was true that camels just naturally frightened horses and mules, and thus were responsible for an unrehea.r.s.ed but extremely lively rodeo wherever they made an unexpected appearance. In an attempt to avoid such incidents, a rider preceded the caravan and warned all that camels were en route. But the rider never succeeded in warning everyone, and some of those he did advise insisted on staying around with their horses or mules, to see for themselves whether he spoke the truth.

Ali managed a flitting grin as he thought of an incident that had followed the unloading. The excited camels, savoring their first happy taste of land after such a long time at sea, were permitted to race about and frolic as they pleased until they tired themselves out and could again be herded. Then they were taken to a corral built especially for them.

The corral was large enough, and as an enclosure for horses or mules it would have been satisfactory enough. In this land, however, conventional building materials were both scarce and expensive. Since p.r.i.c.kly-pear cactus was abundant, the builders had used it to construct their fence.

Far from being repelled by such a th.o.r.n.y barrier, the camels happily ate it!

Regardless of other considerations, the very fact that they could eat such fodder was another indication that they were well adapted to this American Southwest. Ali already knew that, although he might encounter problems different from any previously experienced, there'd be none incapable of solution. Nor was there anything horses and mules could do that camels couldn't do better. A good pack camel was capable of bearing five or six times as much as the best pack horse or mule, and, day for day, he'd carry it farther. He would keep on going, at the same steady pace, past dry water holes or across drought-shriveled areas where lack of water would drive a horse or mule to madness. Although it was often necessary to carry hay and grain for other beasts of burden, a camel would always live off the country.

These camels would do all anyone expected from them and then surpa.s.s expectations, but Ali sighed dolefully as he thought of what had been and what was. Even Major Wayne had been unable to counteract a spontaneous public rejection of these beasts from a far land. Accosted by skeptics who doubted a camel's ability to pack anything at all, Wayne had bales of hay packed on a kneeling camel. The enormous load totaled more than twelve hundred pounds, but, with no hesitation and no visible strain, the camel rose and walked away with the load when ordered to do so.

Compared with the pack animals they knew, it was an incredible feat.

But, although they themselves were eyewitnesses, the onlookers seemed to regard what they had seen as the trick of some circus master. Seeing, they neither accepted nor approved.

The real trouble, Ali thought sadly, was nothing that had yet appeared or would appear on the surface. Although this country was markedly similar to his own native land, there were fundamental differences that had nothing to do with topography. They lay in the hearts and traditions of people who, for past generations, had looked to the horse, the mule and the ox for help in building up their land.

With very few exceptions, even the soldiers a.s.signed to the Camel Corps resented their new duties. For the most part, they were former mule skinners who had been chosen because of their outstanding ability to handle mules. Almost to a man, they yearned to be rid of camels and back with their mules. Only Major Wayne and a very few others had complete confidence in the proposed Camel Corps. Fortunately, some of these were so influential that they must be heard.