day, and then started again about the middle of the
afternoon. Before long the sun begun to look very
curious. First it kind of turned to brass, and then to
copper, and after that it begun to look like a blood-
red ball, and the air got hot and close, and pretty soon
all the sky in the west darkened up and looked thick
and foggy, but fiery and dreadful — like it looks
through a piece of red glass, you know. We looked
down and see a big confusion going on in the caravan,
and a rushing every which way like they was scared;
and then they all flopped down flat in the sand and
laid there perfectly still.
Pretty soon we see something coming that stood up
like an amazing wide wall, and reached from the Desert
up into the sky and hid the sun, and it was coming
like the nation, too. Then a little faint breeze struck
us, and then it come harder, and grains of sand begun
to sift against our faces and sting like fire, and Tom
sung out:
“It’s a sand-storm — turn your backs to it!”
We done it; and in another minute it was blowing a
gale, and the sand beat against us by the shovelful, and
the air was so thick with it we couldn’t see a thing. In
five minutes the boat was level full, and we was setting
on the lockers buried up to the chin in sand, and only
our heads out and could hardly breathe.
Then the storm thinned, and we see that monstrous
wall go a-sailing off across the desert, awful to look at,
I tell you. We dug ourselves out and looked down,
and where the caravan was before there wasn’t any-
thing but just the sand ocean now, and all still and
quiet. All them people and camels was smothered and
dead and buried — buried under ten foot of sand, we
reckoned, and Tom allowed it might be years before
the wind uncovered them, and all that time their friends
wouldn’t ever know what become of that caravan.
Tom said:
“NOW we know what it was that happened to the
people we got the swords and pistols from.”
Yes, sir, that was just it. It was as plain as day
now. They got buried in a sand-storm, and the wild
animals couldn’t get at them, and the wind never un-
covered them again until they was dried to leather and
warn’t fit to eat. It seemed to me we had felt as sorry
for them poor people as a person could for anybody,
and as mournful, too, but we was mistaken; this last
caravan’s death went harder with us, a good deal
harder. You see, the others was total strangers, and
we never got to feeling acquainted with them at all,
except, maybe, a little with the man that was watching
the girl, but it was different with this last caravan. We
was huvvering around them a whole night and ‘most a
whole day, and had got to feeling real friendly with
them, and acquainted. I have found out that there
ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people
or hate them than to travel with them. Just so with
these. We kind of liked them from the start, and
traveling with them put on the finisher. The longer
we traveled with them, and the more we got used to
their ways, the better and better we liked them, and
the gladder and gladder we was that we run across
them. We had come to know some of them so well
that we called them by name when we was talking
about them, and soon got so familiar and sociable that
we even dropped the Miss and Mister and just used
their plain names without any handle, and it did not
seem unpolite, but just the right thing. Of course, it
wasn’t their own names, but names we give them.
There was Mr. Elexander Robinson and Miss Adaline
Robinson, and Colonel Jacob McDougal and Miss
Harryet McDougal, and Judge Jeremiah Butler and
young Bushrod Butler, and these was big chiefs mostly