"Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer Abroad (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

"It's a sand-storm-turn your backs to it!"
We done it; and in another minute it was blowing a gale, and the sand
beat against us by the shovelful, and the air was so thick with it we
couldn't see a thing. In five minutes the boat was level full, and we was
setting on the lockers buried up to the chin in sand, and only our heads
out and could hardly breathe.
Then the storm thinned, and we see that monstrous wall go a-sailing off
across the desert, awful to look at, I tell you. We dug ourselves out and
looked down, and where the caravan was before there wasn't anything but
just the sand ocean now, and all still and quiet. All them people and
camels was smothered and dead and buried-buried under ten foot of sand, we
reckoned, and Tom allowed it might be years before the wind uncovered
them, and all that time their friends wouldn't ever know what become of
that caravan. Tom said:
"NOW we know what it was that happened to the people we got the swords
and pistols from."
Yes, sir, that was just it. It was as plain as day now. They got buried
in a sand-storm, and the wild animals couldn't get at them, and the wind
never uncovered them again until they was dried to leather and warn't fit
to eat. It seemed to me we had felt as sorry for them poor people as a
person could for anybody, and as mournful, too, but we was mistaken; this
last caravan's death went harder with us, a good deal harder. You see, the
others was total strangers, and we never got to feeling acquainted with
them at all, except, maybe, a little with the man that was watching the
girl, but it was different with this last caravan. We was huvvering around
them a whole night and 'most a whole day, and had got to feeling real
friendly with them, and acquainted. I have found out that there ain't no
surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel
with them. Just so with these. We kind of liked them from the start, and
traveling with them put on the finisher. The longer we traveled with them,
and the more we got used 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.