Adventure stories; Americans -- Foreign countries -- Fiction; Balloon ascensions -- Fiction; Sawyer, Tom (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
Harryet McDougal, and Judge Jeremiah Butler and young Bushrod Butler,
and these was big chiefs mostly 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 everything that was
going, and the caravan could depend on us to be on hand every time, it
didn’t make no difference 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 wedding 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.
[Illustration: “When they danced we joined 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.
[Illustration: “The wedding procession”]
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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