He found that if he was tired enough at night, he went to sleep simply because he was too exhausted to stay awake.

Dawn would come soon and the night was at its coldest.

And he was fleeing, running -- fleeing his death and his life at the same time.

Then he was on his way at a gallop.

He scuttled in shadow along the east wall of the stockade and then followed the south wall until he was at the rear of the two frame buildings.

A man was standing in the open door of the lighted orderly room a few yards to Mike's left, but he, too, suddenly made up his mind and went racing to join the confused activity at the east end of the stockade.

Next to him was a young boy I was sure had sat near me at one of the trading sessions.

She had picked up the quirt and was twirling it around her wrist and smiling at him.

I was nearly thirty at the time.

only the counter at one end was lighted by a long fluorescent tube suspended directly above it.

I was at once disappointed, although just what I had expected him to look like I could not have explained.

This desire, I went on, growing voluble as my conviction was aroused, had mounted at such a rate recently that I now found its realization necessary not only to my physical but also to my spiritual wellbeing.

Facing the forest now, she who had not dared to enter it before, walked between two trees at random and headed in what she believed was the direction of the pool.

She regarded them as signs that she was nearing the glen she sought, and she was glad to at last be doing something positive in her unenunciated, undefined struggle with the mountain and its darkling inhabitants.

laughing at a dying man, laughing as a man was beaten to death.

He'd started a fire and put coffee on, and now was busy at the work board of his chuck wagon.

Hank had gathered wood for a cookfire, and his wife was busy at it now.

Tom Horn was soon back at work, giving his secret employers their money's worth.

Haying time was close at hand, and they needed some strong branches to repair a hay rack.

`` It was Brenner's idea '', Jess mumbled, dabbing at his nose.

Seeing them waiting there at the foot of Emigrant Rock was so overwhelming that, for a good minute after they rounded the bend and started down the grade leading toward them, Matilda could not speak at all.

He was silent a moment, thinking he could use a man this time of year, and if the girl could cook, it would give him more time in the meadows, but he knew nothing about the couple.

She brought up her free hand to hit him, but this time he was quicker.

The coyote was calling again, and he hoped that this time there would be no other sounds to interrupt it.

No one was behind it, but in the rear wall of the office I noticed, for the first time, a door which had been left partially open.

It was a bold, dark castle of pine boughs that stood like a medieval fortress, eclipsing the sun and human time.

At one and the same time, she was within it but still searching for the drawbridge that would give her entry.

I found a trooper once the Apache had spread-eagled on an ant hill, and another time we ran across some teamsters they'd caught, tied upside down on their own wagon wheels over little fires until their brains was exploded right out o' their skulls.

One thing was certain -- his method was effective, so effective that after a time even the warning notices were often unnecessary.

Out in the center of the circle the farmer, who was Dan, wasted no time when they came to the line, `` The farmer choose his wife ''.

From the time the chocks were pulled until the plane was out of sight, he knew Donovan would keep his back to the strip.

It was all Greg had time to see.

I seized the rack and made a western-style flying-mount just in time, one of my knees mercifully landing on my duffel bag -- and merely wrecking my camera, I was to discover later -- my other knee landing on the slivery truck floor boards and -- but this is no medical report.

Just as I got to my knees, there was again the sound of the fence stretching, and I had time only to start taking my kneeling posture seriously.

The Indian was again raising his bottle, but to my astonished relief -- probably only a fraction of Johnson's -- the bottle this time went to the Indian's lips.

There was no time to pick out a penny ; ;

This time there was no sound of brakes but the shrieking of women.

`` No, I remembered reading about you in the papers and that you lived here, and when it happened all I could think of was '' -- This time she stopped the rush of words herself.

My new Aunt was perhaps three or four years older than I and it had been a long time since I had seen as gorgeous a woman who oozed sex.

I was aware of a humid look in her eyes that told me the time was opportune.

The silence oppressed him, made him bend low over the horse's neck as if to hide from a wind that had begun to blow far away and was twisting slowly through the darkness in its slow search.

She glanced around the clearing, taking in the wagon and the load of supplies and trappings scattered over the ground, the two kids, the whiteface bull that was chewing its cud just within the far reaches of the firelight.

The town was about what Wilson expected: one main street with its rows of false-fronted buildings, a water tower, a few warehouses, a single hotel ; ;

Each of those tickets was of great value to its rightful recipient.

It was, I felt, possible that they were men who, having received no tickets for that day, had remained in the hall, to sleep perhaps, in the corners farthest removed from the counter with its overhead light.

Though only a relatively short walk separated it from my own part of town, its character was wholly foreign to me.

There was only one place where the mountain might receive her -- that unnamed, unnameable pool harbored in its secret bosom.

Was it not possible, after all, that the forest was in league with her and her child that its sympathy lay with the Culvers that she had erred in failing to understand this??

Unconcerned, indifferent, unmotivated, the forest was simply there -- fighting man's depredations with more abundant growth and man's follies with its own musical evening laughter.

Still nursing anger I listlessly thumbed a car that was slowly approaching, its pre-war chrome nearly blinding me.

A big car was approaching, its chrome teeth grinning.

The car was just about to us, its driver's fat, solemn face intent on the road ahead, on business, on a family in Sante Fe -- on anything but an old pick-up truck in which two human beings desperately needed rescue.

`` It was a king cobra, the largest you ever saw, and it deserved to live out its life in the jungle, didn't it??

There was a measure of protection in its concrete walls and ceiling, but the engineers who hastily installed it were well aware that concrete is not much better than prayer, if as efficacious, when a direct hit comes along.

His gun was half drawn when he asked the question, but the weapon never left its holster.

For lawyers, reflecting perhaps their parochial preferences, there has been a special fascination since then in the role played by the Supreme Court in that transformation -- the manner in which its decisions altered in `` the switch in time that saved nine '', President Roosevelt's ill-starred but in effect victorious `` Court-packing plan '', the imprimatur of judicial approval that was finally placed upon social legislation.

Its ribs showed, it was a yellow nondescript color, it suffered from a variety of sores, hair had scabbed off its body in patches.

A few months ago it was a fairly typical landlord who in the dead of night lugged me up a mountainside to drink from a spring famous in the neighborhood for its clarity and flavor.

All but the most rabid of Confederate flag wavers admit that the Old Southern tradition is defunct in actuality and sigh that its passing was accompanied by the disappearance of many genteel and aristocratic traditions of the reputedly languid ante-bellum way of life.

Even two decades ago in Go Down, Moses Faulkner was looking to the more urban future with a glimmer of hope that through its youth and its new way of life the South might be reborn and the curse of slavery erased from its soil.