om says.

"ALL?" says Jim, astonished. "What 'come o' de camel?"

"I don't know."

"Mars Tom, don't de tale say?"

"No."

Jim puzzled a minute, then he says:

"Well! Ef dat ain't de beatenes' tale ever I struck. Jist gits to de
place whah de intrust is gittin' red-hot, en down she breaks. Why, Mars
Tom, dey ain't no SENSE in a tale dat acts like dat. Hain't you got no
IDEA whether de man got de camel back er not?"

"No, I haven't."

I see myself there warn't no sense in the tale, to chop square off that
way before it come to anything, but I warn't going to say so, because I
could see Tom was souring up pretty fast over the way it flatted out
and the way Jim had popped on to the weak place in it, and I don't think
it's fair for everybody to pile on to a feller when he's down. But Tom
he whirls on me and says:

"What do YOU think of the tale?"

Of course, then, I had to come out and make a clean breast and say it
did seem to me, too, same as it did to Jim, that as long as the tale
stopped square in the middle and never got to no place, it really warn't
worth the trouble of telling.

Tom's chin dropped on his breast, and 'stead of being mad, as I reckoned
he'd be, to hear me scoff at his tale that way, he seemed to be only
sad; and he says:

"Some people can see, and some can't--just as that man said. Let alone
a camel, if a cyclone had gone by, YOU duffers wouldn't 'a' noticed the
track."

I don't know what he meant by that, and he didn't say; it was just one
of his irrulevances, I reckon--he was full of them, sometimes, when he
was in a close place and couldn't see no other way out--but I didn't
mind. We'd spotted the soft place in that tale sharp enough, he couldn't
git away from that little fact. It graveled him like the nation, too, I
reckon, much as he tried not to let on.

CHAPTER VIII. THE DISAPPEARING LAKE

WE had an early breakfast in the morning, and set looking down on the
desert, and the weather was ever so bammy and lovely, although we warn't
high up. You have to come down lower and lower after sundown in the
desert, because it cools off so fast; and so, by the time it is getting
toward dawn, you are skimming along only a little ways above the sand.

We was watching the shadder of the balloon slide along the ground,
and now and then gazing off across the desert to see if anything was
stirring, and then down on the shadder again, when all of a sudden
almost right under us we see a lot