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.

He had been a friend of the Hardings, and continued to be invited by the Coolidges.

Very soon after his arrival in Little Rock, Pike had joined one of the most influential organizations in town, the Little Rock Debating Society, and it was with this group that he made his debut as an orator, being invited to deliver the annual Fourth of July address the club sponsored every year.

Roleplaying was offered as a solution -- and the procedure worked as follows: all candidates were invited to a hotel conference room, where the president explained the difficulty he had, and how unnecessary it seemed to him to hire people who just did not work out.

We had nearly decided that all the tales of Lao lethargy must be true, when we were invited to take a trip with the Prime Minister.

She had invited him in for coffee.

The school's founder, James Pierpont Greaves, had only recently died but Alcott was invited to stay there for a week.

After his full sister Tamar was raped by Amnon, their half-brother and David's eldest son, Absalom waited two years and avenged her by sending his servants to murder Amnon at a feast to which he had invited all the king's sons.

Not on good terms with Caracalla, Geta had been invited to a family reconciliation, at which time he was ambushed by centurions in Caracalla's army and slain in his mother Julia's arms.

However, in his attempts to conquer Moravia, in 899 Arnulf invited across the Magyars who had settled in Pannonia, and with their help he imposed a measure of control on Moravia.

In order not to be surprised by the return of Agamemnon, he sent out spies, and when Agamemnon came, Aegisthus invited him to a repast at which he had him treacherously murdered.

Two years later, to avenge his sister, Absalom, Amnon's half-brother and Tamar's full brother, sent his servants to kill Amnon at a feast to which he had invited all the king's sons.

When Jackson returned briefly to England in 1889 to marry, Housman was not invited to the wedding and knew nothing about it until the couple had left the country.

Initially, Raimi invited Scott Spiegel to co-write Army of Darkness because he had done a good job on Evil Dead II, but he was busy on rewrites for the Clint Eastwood film The Rookie.

Bishop Alexander, so the tale runs, had invited a number of fellow prelates to meet him at breakfast after a great religious function.

This did not mollify those who were displeased with the fact that the Iranian leader had been invited onto the campus.

Caligula invited Ptolemy to Rome and then had him suddenly executed.

By early summer 1915, Hilbert's interest in physics had focused on general relativity, and he invited Einstein to Göttingen to deliver a week of lectures on the subject.

Dissatisfied with his stage name as Davy ( and Davie ) Jones, which in the mid-1960s invited confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees, Bowie renamed himself after the 19th century American frontiersman Jim Bowie and the knife he had popularised.

The goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite had been invited along with the rest of Olympus to the forced wedding of Peleus and Thetis, who would become the parents of Achilles, but Eris had been snubbed because of her troublemaking inclinations.

Henry DeWolf Smyth, who was Chairman of the Princeton Physics department, had once invited Fermi over to do some experiments with the Princeton cyclotron.

Before General Motors invited Bel Geddes to submit a proposal for the exhibit, they had planned to put in another production line as was featured at their exhibit in the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933 in Chicago.

By February 1945 David Astor had invited Orwell to become a war correspondent for the Observer.

Early in 1960, Kelly, an ardent Francophile and fluent French speaker, was invited by A. M. Julien, the general administrator of the Paris Opéra and Opéra-Comique, to select his own material and create a modern ballet for the company, the first time an American had received such an assignment.

In 1970, he made another TV special: Gene Kelly and 50 Girls and was invited to bring the show to Las Vegas, Nevada, which he duly did for an eight-week stint – on condition he be paid more than any artist had hitherto been paid there.