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.

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 ag