a noise will fetch
him. I wish I knowed what was the reason of that, but there don't seem
to be no way to find out. Now there was Jim alarming the whole Desert,
and yanking the animals out, for miles and miles around, to see what in
the nation was going on up there; there warn't nobody nor nothing that
was as close to the noise as HE was, and yet he was the only cretur that
wasn't disturbed by it. We yelled at him and whooped at him, it never
done no good; but the first time there come a little wee noise that
wasn't of a usual kind it woke him up. No, sir, I've thought it all
over, and so has Tom, and there ain't no way to find out why a snorer
can't hear himself snore.

Jim said he hadn't been asleep; he just shut his eyes so he could listen
better.

Tom said nobody warn't accusing him.

That made him look like he wished he hadn't said anything. And he wanted
to git away from the subject, I reckon, because he begun to abuse the
camel-driver, just the way a person does when he has got catched in
something and wants to take it out of somebody else. He let into the
camel-driver the hardest he knowed how, and I had to agree with him; and
he praised up the dervish the highest he could, and I had to agree with
him there, too. But Tom says:

"I ain't so sure. You call that dervish so dreadful liberal and good
and unselfish, but I don't quite see it. He didn't hunt up another poor
dervish, did he? No, he didn't. If he was so unselfish, why didn't he
go in there himself and take a pocketful of jewels and go along and
be satisfied? No, sir, the person he was hunting for was a man with a
hundred camels. He wanted to get away with all the treasure he could."

"Why, Mars Tom, he was willin' to divide, fair and square; he only
struck for fifty camels."

"Because he knowed how he was going to get all of them by and by."

"Mars Tom, he TOLE de man de truck would make him bline."

"Yes, because he knowed the man's character. It was just the kind of a
man he was hunting for--a man that never believes in anybody's word or
anybody's honorableness, because he ain't got none of his own. I reckon
there's lots of people like that dervish. They swindle, right and left,
but they always make the other person SEEM to swindle himself. They keep
inside of the letter of the law all the time, and there ain't no way
to git hold of them. THEY don't put the salve on--oh, no, that would
be sin; but they know how to fool YOU into putting it on, t