But it at least offered him a chance for living.

sufficiently, at least, to get them back into town.

Not without a face-saving respite of at least a few minutes.

It seemed long, at least to Tom Brannon.

I would have foregone my romantic chances rather than leave a friend sweltering and dusty and -- Well, at least I wouldn't have shouted back a taunt.

Or at least not to Joyce.

It'll probably be at least an hour or two before I can check back with you.

I'll be soaking for at least half an hour ''.

`` I might have starved, but at least I wouldn't be fried to a crisp and soaked with dirt ''!!

After the war, Penny had wanted Keith at least to visit her home with her.

Slug the kid, grab his dough -- at least enough to get to Philadelphia -- and then have a rockin' ball with the doll.

since Bourbon whiskey, though of Kentucky origin, is at least as much favored by liberals in the North as by conservatives in the South.

This is puzzling to an outsider conscious of the classic tradition of liberalism, because it is clear that these Democrats who are left-of-center are at opposite poles from the liberal Jefferson, who held that the best government was the least government.

His assumption seems to be that any such friends, being tolerable humans, must be more liberal than most Southerners and therefore at least partly in sympathy with his views.

A third, one of at least equal and perhaps even greater importance, is now being traversed: American immersion and involvement in world affairs.

By subduing disparate lesser groups the nation has, to some degree at least, broadened the capacity for individual liberty.

And it is expressed, at least to their taste, in a perfect form.

On this trip to the South he wants, above all else, to sniff the effluvium of backwoods-and-sand-hill subhumanity and to see at least one barn burn at midnight ''.

And yet we obviously also believe that the avoidance of the disaster depends in some obscure or at least uncertain way on the details of how we behave.

That, I thought, is at least one thing I can find out when we meet.

All such imitations of negative quality have given rise to a compensatory response in the form of a heroic and highly individualistic humanism: if man can neither know nor love reality as it is, he can at least invent an artistic `` reality '' which is its own world and which can speak to man of purely personal and subjective qualities capable of being known and worthy of being loved.

Any attempt to reconcile this statement of the central issue in the campaign of 1956 with the nature of the man who could not conceive it as the central issue will at least resolve our confusions about the chaotic and misleading results of the earnestness of both doctors and President in a situation which should never have arisen.

The planter aristocracy has appeared in literature at least since John Pendleton Kennedy published Swallow-Barn in 1832 and in his genial portrait of Frank Meriwether presiding over his plantation dominion initiated the most persistent tradition of Southern literature.

They have an ancestry extending back, however, at least to 1728, when William Byrd described the Lubberlanders he encountered in the back country of Virginia and North Carolina.

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.