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.

It looked as Gavin had first seen it years ago, on those nights when he slept alone by his campfire and waked suddenly to the hoot of an owl or the rustle of a blade of grass in the moon's wind -- a savage land, untenanted and brooding, too strong to be broken by the will of men.

At first I thought he had missed.

But her prettiness was what he had noticed first, and all the other things had come afterward: cruelty, meanness, self-will.

For his first five years in prison, they had shared a cell.

For men who had left cattle alone after getting their first notices had received no second.

He had received both first and second anonymous notices, and each time he had accused his neighbors of writing them.

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:

For Matilda, it was the first she had known in many a night.

Even the knowledge that she was losing another boy, as a mother always does when a marriage is made, did not prevent her from having the first carefree, dreamless sleep that she had known since they dropped down the canyon and into Bear Valley, way, way back there when they were crossing those other mountains.

Stevens was grunting over the last empty pocket when Russ abruptly rose and lunged toward Carmer's hat, which had tumbled half-a-dozen feet away when he first fell.

At the first shot Russ had hurled his mount to the left toward the side of the winding draw.

A call to the police had been placed from here a couple of minutes after nine P.M., and the first police car had arrived two or three minutes after that -- 10 minutes ago now.

( Would she have been able to had she known that the blanket belonged to a young ballet dancer Nicolas had found his first night in one of Walter's marked bars??

At first it had been just a romantic dream of his, the same as the idea of finishing Oxford after the war.

Old Commodore Forsythe, who had once lost a fifty-dollar bet on whether he could get both motors started and turn on the running lights without accidentally turning on something else first.

Hell, I gave him the first decent job he ever had, six, seven -- how many years ago was it, Rob ''??

He had presented the first German performances of Puccini's Manon Lescaut and De Falla's La Vida Breve.

After he had spent the first three years in New York as associate conductor, at Toscanini's invitation, of the NBC Orchestra, he made numerous guest appearances throughout the United States and Latin America.

When I mentioned that for my first long voyage I did not even have the money for the return fare, but had trusted to luck that I would earn a sufficient amount, the young people looked at me doubtingly.

Others mentioned that I might have had to ask friends or even strangers for help and that to be stranded in a foreign country without sufficient funds did not contribute to international understanding.

Adams depended largely on the dispatches of foreign ambassadors and observers in England, claiming that the reports of such agents had to be accurate because there were no newspapers.

Now, everyone knows -- or knew in the week of December 10 -- that something had gone shockingly wrong with American foreign policy.

Nationalism has abetted not only the repudiation of foreign religions but the revival of native ones, some of which had been lying in slumber for centuries.

Three of the four persons present, all foreign students in Tokyo, had been playing a game of judging popular Japanese foods by the In and Out system, an equation in which Zen philosophy was used as the modifier.

Lincoln's foreign policy approach had been initially hands off, due to his inexperience ; he left most diplomacy appointments and other foreign policy matters to his Secretary of State, William Seward.

Newly independent Armenia needed the income from foreign sales of Nairit rubber and chemical products, many of which had been assigned exclusively to that plant under the Soviet system and were still unavailable elsewhere to the former Soviet republics in the early 1990s.

In fact, there is no evidence of the deposed Sultan being allowed to make such foreign travels, nor did Voltaire ( or Gürsel ) assert that it had any actual historical foundation.

After the battle, according to a tradition reported by Paul the Deacon, to be granted the right to sit at his father's table, Alboin had to ask for the hospitality of a foreign king and have him donate his weapons, as was customary.

Peter felt insulted: the flight of the tsarevich to a foreign potentate was a reproach and a scandal, and he had to be recovered and brought back to Russia at all costs.

The Danish attacks had been particularly damaging to the monasteries, and though Alfred founded monasteries at Athelney and Shaftesbury, the first new monastic houses in Wessex since the beginning of the eighth century, and enticed foreign monks to England, monasticism did not revive significantly during his reign.

Athenian citizens had to be descended from citizens — after the reforms of Pericles and Cimon in 450 BC on both sides of the family, excluding the children of Athenian men and foreign women.

An independent Athens was a minor power in the Hellenistic age ; it rarely had much in the way of foreign policy ; it generally remained at peace, allied either with the Ptolemaic dynasty, or later, with Rome ; when it went to war, the result ( as in the Lamian, Chremonidean, and Mithridatic War ) was usually disastrous.

The 71-years-old new King was completely inexperienced in government, thus he had no intention of initiating profound changes in foreign or domestic policy.

The Brazilian foreign policy under the Lula da Silva administration had been focused on the following directives: to contribute toward the search for greater equilibrium and attenuate unilateralism ; to strengthen bilateral and multilateral relations in order to increase the country's weight in political and economic negotiations on an international level ; to deepen relations so as to benefit from greater economical, financial, technological and cultural interchange ; to avoid agreements that could jeopardize development in the long term.

He had not resided there long when an edict appeared ( August 8, 1564 ) banishing all foreign dissidents.

But the Third Reich's foreign policy had forced the Nazi state into war before it had fully prepared.

Lord Grey had been the foreign secretary during the McMahon-Hussein negotiations.

Speaking in the House of Lords on 27 March 1923, he made it clear that he entertained serious doubts as to the validity of the British government's interpretation of the pledges which he, as foreign secretary, had caused to be given to Hussein in 1915.

But most damaging, the new situation effectively trapped Russian foreign policy: After 1913, Russia could not afford losing its last ally in this crucial area and thus had no alternatives but to unconditionally support Serbia when the crisis between Serbia and Austria broke out in 1914.

However, due to concerns over the previous Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista the company had started foreign branches a few years prior to the revolution ; the Company moved the ownership of the Company's trademarks, assets and proprietary formulas out of the country to the Bahamas prior to the revolution as well as constructing plants in Puerto Rico and Mexico after the prohibition era to save in import taxes for rum being imported to the US.

One could note a certain irony: one of the first acts of many of the newly independent states was to adopt the law of the foreign sovereign from whom independence had just been gained.

In 1973, Chile was in shambles – inflation was hundreds of percents, the country had no foreign reserves, and GDP was falling.