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.

He had ordered the ponies brought inside the fortified circle and had assigned Pierre and a band of picked engages the job of trying to keep them steady under fire.

She had picked up the quirt and was twirling it around her wrist and smiling at him.

Artie had picked up a snorkle and was twirling it on his forefinger.

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.

What obsessions had she picked up during these long nights of talk??

From his playmates in Savannah, Mercer had picked up, along with a soft Southern dialect, traces also of the Gullah dialects of Africa.

She had been picked up by the Russians, questioned in connection with some pamphlets, sentenced to life imprisonment for espionage.

Warren thought of all the men out that night who, like himself, had left their protective ridge and -- fear working at their guts -- picked their way into the area beyond.

When he had stored his stock in the great oak chest, locked the two big hasps and secured the additional chain, tied the fly of the tent, and picked up the cash box, he moved up the darkening street.

One soft evening -- that marvelous sea-blessed time when the sun's departing warmth lingers and a smell of spume and wrack haunts everything -- Amy had picked herself off the floor and begun to walk.

I look like an old man, compared '', and he had picked up his photograph with the red Christmas bow still on it.

In it was a stone Tibetan Buddha I had picked up in Bombay, and occasionally, to make merit, my wife and I garlanded it with flowers or laid a few pennies in its lap.

He was not the sort of sailor Hudson wanted his backers to see on board and he had Greene wait at Gravesend, where the Discovery picked him up.

When I interviewed Kirby, who as a boy picked up pears in the Borden yard, I asked if anybody else in the household besides Lizzie and Morse had been under any suspicion at the time of the murders.

The wastebasket stood near the wall next to the divan, and the instant Casey picked it up he knew what had happened.

He called the bar and grill where he had picked Burton up that afternoon.

The cleansing tissues she had been using had been falling on the floor, and he got up and picked up one, then another, hoping she would notice what he was doing.

I could see the ancient cynicism reinforce itself in her eyes, and I wondered how many men she had picked up with this same gambit.

He seemed to have picked up a virus that day, because the next morning he had a small cough and felt a bit hot.

I picked him up, and the length of him arched very carefully and gracefully and only a little wildly, and I could feel the coolness of that radiant, fire-colored body, like splendid ice, and I knew that he had eaten only recently because there were two whole and solid little lumps in the forepart of him, like fieldmice swallowed whole might make.

Anne waited until the door had slammed and picked up the coffeepot.

Start out fresh, the two of us, like nothin had ever happened ''.

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

They had the house cleaned up by noon, and Wilson sent the boy out to the meadow to bring in the horses.

Its front was windowless, but irregularities in the masonry might be an indication that windows, now blinded, had once looked out upon the street.

It was all right to put a bunch of ranchers onto horses, to call them Night Riders, to set out to attack the largest mining combination the country had ever seen if all they wanted was adventure.

Twenty years before a group of Easterners had bought out the Haskell claims in the rocky hills south of Grass Valley.

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

He seemed very pleased with himself, as though some intricate scheme was working out exactly as he had planned.

Tom had been laying for Aaron McBride for a long time, just waiting to catch him out of line.

By failing to do as he was told instantly -- to take out a permit or return the gun to his car -- he had played into Lord's hands.

`` We'll ride out as soon as we've had chuck ''.

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.

For Tom Horn, it turned out, had a number of rancher and cowboy witnesses ready and willing to swear with straight faces that he had been in Bates Hole the day of the killing.

I found a trooper once the Apache had spread-eagled on an ant hill, and another time we ran across some teamsters they'd caught, tied upside down on their own wagon wheels over little fires until their brains was exploded right out o' their skulls.

The mere fact that the tall figure with the rifle and field glasses had been seen riding that way was enough to frighten three rustling homesteaders out of the Upper Laramie country in a single week.

Nor could they stop and find out about all that had happened until they made circle, tended the cattle, tethered the horses, gathered fuel, carried water, and started their cooking fires.

When the sea was visible ahead of them, the relief was as great as if the sun had come out.

Finally, as time began to run out, he headed into Ormoc and glide-bombed a group of houses that Intelligence had thought might contain Japanese supplies.

There had been a good second or two during which my muffler had been blowing out, and now I was certain I'd seen her somewhere before.