If he had married her, he'd have been asking for trouble.

They had been seen as soon as they left the ranch, picked out of the darkness by the weary though watchful eyes of two men posted a few hundred yards away in the windless shelter of the trees.

They greeted the news angrily, as though they had been cheated of purpose.

With every leaping stride of the horse beneath him he crossed one more patch of earth that had been his, that he would never see again.

He had been carrying an Enfield rifle and a holstered navy cap-and-ball pistol.

But the luck that had been running their way left him.

His shout had been taken up and repeated.

A sizable supply of powder had been touched off.

The worst part had been the waiting ; ;

The war captain had been badly wounded and was fighting to hold his seat.

And one had been too many.

That afternoon when they had pulled up in front of the broken-down ranch house, his hopes had been high.

The place had been cheap -- just the little he had left after Amelia's burial -- and it would serve its purpose.

I had for some time been hoping, in vain, for one of the dim figures to pass between the fan vents and myself.

Although I had been inside it I had not yet seen it functioning.

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.

He had been worried that with Miller and Rankin added to the escape party they would be short.

He had been one of the original Night Riders, one who had escaped the trial.

He had been the auditor for the mining syndicate, and he had stolen fifty thousand dollars of the syndicate's money.

Then the vein had petered out and the whole project had been abandoned.

She had reached a point at which she didn't even care how she looked.

She stared at him, her eyes wide as she thought about what he had said ; ;

First he thought of the time he had ridden to Gavin and told him how his cattle were being rustled at the far end of the valley.

All were carrying guns they had seized up, but they were half-clad or hardly clad at all.

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.

But a moment later he brought his horse forward into the light, and Wilson had a good look at him.

Her hat had come off and fallen behind her shoulders, held by the string, and he could see her face more clearly than he had at any time before.

He scrubbed absent-mindedly at the pans and reflected on how things had turned out.

I could observe the two fans down at the end, but their size in themselves meant nothing to me as long as I had no measure of comparison.

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.

Kodyke had appeared at the mine one day bearing a letter from Kruger.

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.

He could not grasp that Lord had withdrawn from the fight minutes ago, and that his leaden arms were flailing at nothing but the air.

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

Tom Brannon had caught up with the outfit shortly after the Maguires joined it, which had been at midday.

But the day of the deadline came and passed, and the men who had scoffed at the warnings laughed with satisfaction.

He had cursed at them and threatened them.

This time Lewis had his own rifle in his hands, and he threw some answering fire back at the mysterious far-off shot, then spent most of the day searching out the area.

Rumors of the offer Tom Horn had made at the Stockgrowers' Association meeting had leaked out by then, and as a grand jury investigation of the murder got underway, the prosecuting attorney, a Colonel Baird, ordered that the tall stock detective be summoned for questioning.

Andy Ross had just started swinging an ax at his second willow when the distant blast of a rifle sounded.