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 the feeling that, under the mouldering leaves, there would be the bodies of dead animals, quietly decaying and giving their soil back to the mountain.

For less than a dozen miles from the unplowed land of the dead man lived another settler who had ignored the warnings that his existence might be foreclosed on -- a blatant and defiant rustler named Fred Powell.

When Fred Powell's brother-in-law, Charlie Keane, moved into the dead man's home, the anonymous letter writer took no chances on Charlie taking up where Fred had left off and wasted no time on a first notice:

Present at the scene -- in addition to the dead man, who was indeed Louis Thor -- had been Thor's partner Bill Blake, and Antony Rose, an advertising agency executive who handled the zing account.

For three days, their stolid oxen had plodded up a blazing valley as flat and featureless as a dead sea.

They had located the runway of a colony of ants and as the ants came out of the ground, the boys picked them up, one at a time, and pinched them dead.

The Jews had been banished from England in 1290 and were not permitted to return before 1655, when Shakespeare had been dead for thirty-nine years.

I do not suppose you ever heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald, living or dead, and moreover I do not suppose that, even if you had, his legend would have seemed to you to warrant more than a cluck of disapproval.

When Nan Patterson, a stunning and money-minded chorus girl who had appeared in a Floradora road show, rode down Broadway in a hansom cab with her married lover, Frank Young, she stopped the cab to disclose that Young had been shot dead, tearfully insisting that he had shot himself although experts said he could not have done so.

Many of my friends at the time thought that I had received a well-deserved condemnation when Lincoln Steffens denounced me in a review of one of my books as a perfect example of the obsolete man who could understand and sympathize only with the dead past.

Her mother, now dead, was my good friend and when she came to tell us about her plans and to show off her ring I had a sobering wish to say something meaningful to her, something her mother would wish said.

For the old preacher who had been there twenty-five years was dead, and the city mourned him.

Under the trees, there was a dead redcoat, a young boy with a pasty white skin and a face full of pimples, who had taken a rifle ball directly between the eyes.

Even though he would later be resurrected, he was at this moment dead indeed, the expression on his face reflecting what he had gone through on the cross.

Russell had reached the house as Cook surmised, dismounted, but just as the old trapper opened the door to receive him, he fell into the trapper's arms -- dead.

Just yesterday we had met and talked with a living writer, a contemporary of the dead poet, who is known for his ability of manipulating his ideas and his craft more advantageously.

Dickens suggests the economic evils of such a society on the first page of his novel in the description of Pip's five little dead brothers `` who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle '', who seemed to have `` all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence ''.

While women had always attended ball games in small numbers ( it was the part of a `` dead game sport '' in the early years of the twentieth century to be taken out to the ball park and to root, root, root for the home team ), they had often sat in patient martyrdom, unable even to read the scoreboard, which sometimes seemed to indicate that one team led another by a score of three hundred and eighty to one hundred and fifty-one.

A man named Lars Simon, playwright-director, had expressed a wish that Anthony Payne drop dead.

if we'd really been trying to get him dead drunk we'd have had to go out for more wine.

Since he possessed more power in an interdependent universe of living beings and dead spirits, the emperor had to use it for the benefit of the living.