to their ways, the better
and better we liked them, and the gladder and gladder we was that we run
across them. We had come to know some of them so well that we called them
by name when we was talking about them, and soon got so familiar and
sociable that we even dropped the Miss and Mister and just used their
plain names without any handle, and it did not seem unpolite, but just
the right thing. Of course, it wasn't their own names, but names we give
them. There was Mr. Elexander Robinson and Miss Adaline Robinson, and
Colonel Jacob McDougal and Miss 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.

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 looki