that wore splendid great turbans and simmeters, and
dressed like the Grand Mogul, and their families. But
as soon as we come to know them good, and like them
very much, it warn’t Mister, nor Judge, nor nothing,
any more, but only Elleck, and Addy, and Jake, and
Hattie, and Jerry, and Buck, and so on.
And you know the more you join in with people in
their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and
dearer they come to be to you. Now we warn’t cold
and indifferent, the way most travelers is, we was right
down friendly and sociable, and took a chance in every-
thing that was going, and the caravan could depend on
us to be on hand every time, it didn’t make no differ-
ence what it was.
When they camped, we camped right over them, ten
or twelve hundred feet up in the air. When they et a
meal, we et ourn, and it made it ever so much home-
liker to have their company. When they had a wed-
ding that night, and Buck and Addy got married, we
got ourselves up in the very starchiest of the professor’s
duds for the blow-out, and when they danced we jined
in and shook a foot up there.
But it is sorrow and trouble that brings you the
nearest, and it was a funeral that done it with us. It
was next morning, just in the still dawn. We didn’t
know the diseased, and he warn’t in our set, but that
never made no difference; he belonged to the caravan,
and that was enough, and there warn’t no more sincerer
tears shed over him than the ones we dripped on him
from up there eleven hundred foot on high.
Yes, parting with this caravan was much more
bitterer than it was to part with them others, which was
comparative strangers, and been dead so long, anyway.
We had knowed these in their lives, and was fond of
them, too, and now to have death snatch them from
right before our faces while we was looking, and leave
us so lonesome and friendless in the middle of that big
desert, it did hurt so, and we wished we mightn’t ever
make any more friends on that voyage if we was
going to lose them again like that.
We couldn’t keep from talking about them, and
they was all the time coming up in our memory, and
looking just the way they looked when we was all alive
and happy together. We could see the line marching,
and the shiny spearheads a-winking in the sun; we
could see the dromedaries lumbering along; we could
see the wedding and the funeral; and more oftener
than anything else we could see them praying, because
they don’t allow nothing to prevent that; whenever
the call come, several times a day, they would stop
right there, and stand up and face to the east, and lift
back their heads, and spread out their arms and begin,
and four or five times they would go down on their
knees, and then fall forward and touch their forehead
to the ground.
Well, it warn’t good to go on talking about them,
lovely as they was in their life, and dear to us in their
life and death both, because it didn’t do no good, and
made us too down-hearted. Jim allowed he was going
to live as good a life as he could, so he could see them
again in a better world; and Tom kept still and didn’t
tell him they was only Mohammedans; it warn’t no
use to disappoint him, he was feeling bad enough just
as it was.
When we woke up next morning we was feeling a
little cheerfuller, and had had a most powerful good
sleep, because sand is the comfortablest bed there is,
and I don’t see why people that can afford it don’t
have it more. And it’s terrible good ballast, too; I
never see the balloon so steady before.
Tom allowed we had twenty tons of it, and wondered
what we better do with it; it was good sand, and it
didn’t seem good sense to throw it away. Jim says: