Any lingering suspicion that this was a trick Al Budd had thought up was dispelled.

He was tall and dark-skinned, a half-breed, Wilson thought.

It was obvious that he wished himself different from the sort of person he thought he was.

When they reached their neighbor's house, Pamela said a few polite words to Grace and kissed Melissa lightly on the forehead, the impulse prompted by a stray thought -- of the type to which she was frequently subject these days -- that they might never see one another again.

Perhaps it was insane, Pamela thought.

It was not, thought Pamela, such an evil place after all.

Mrs. Roebuck thought Johnson was a `` sweet bawh t'lah lahk thet '', but her Herman was getting to be a man, there was no getting around it.

The way his red rubber lips were stretched across his pearly little teeth I thought he was only having a little joke, but, no, he wanted me to bend down from the roar of wind so he could roar something into my ear.

You thought I was a Mexican, didn't you, buddy ''??

Maybe Lou was only unconscious, but right then I thought he must be dead.

She was like charcoal, he thought -- dark, opaque, explosive.

At first, I thought he was out of his head, talking wildly like this.

He was aware of her as a frightfully good-looking American WAC, a second lieutenant assigned to do the paper work, ( regardless of how important she might have thought she was ) in the Command offices, but that was all.

`` When I came up, damnit, I thought I was going down.

Jack walked off alone out the road in the searing midday sun, past Robert Allen's three-room, tarpapered house, toward the field where the other boys were playing ball, thinking of what he would do in order to make Miss Langford have him stay in after school -- because this was the day he had decided when he thought he saw the look in her eyes.

That should do it, he thought, because Miss Langford had said she was going to be strict about school work.

`` I hated the war '', he said, `` but thought I ought to go because I was, perhaps, one of those who hadn't done enough to prevent it ''.

Miriam had not yet goaded him into mentioning her directly, but one can feel the generalized anger in Wright's remarks to reporters when he was asked, one morning on arrival in Chicago, what he thought of the city as a whole.

If there was ever a thought in her mind she might devote her life to religion, it was now dispelled.

The easiest thing would be to sell out to Al Budd and leave the country, but there was a stubborn streak in him that wouldn't allow it.

He didn't think it was possible for this couple to be pretending.

Evidently this was a precaution so that mounts would be available in an emergency.

He might tell her how sorry a spectacle she was making of herself, pretending to be blind to the way Julia Fortune had taken Dean's affections from her.

It was pitiful to see the thin ranks of warriors, old and young, wheeling and twisting their ponies frantically from side to side only to be tumbled bleeding from their saddles by the relentless slam, slam of the cruelly efficient Hawkinses.

The coyote was calling again, and he hoped that this time there would be no other sounds to interrupt it.

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

She regarded them as signs that she was nearing the glen she sought, and she was glad to at last be doing something positive in her unenunciated, undefined struggle with the mountain and its darkling inhabitants.

Having persisted too long in deliberate ignorance and denial of the forces that threatened her, Pamela was relieved now to admit their potency and to be taking definite steps toward grappling with them.

she must be poised and proud and unafraid in order to prove to the mountain that she was in earnest.

There was a peculiar density about it, a thick substance that could be sensed but never identified, never actually perceived.

The herd was watered and then thrown onto a broad grass flat which was to be the first night's bedground.

It was to be nothing more than that.

There was to be no gunplay.

If you don't leave this country within 3 days, your life will be taken the same as Powell's was.

Probably his horse would be close to where he was hiding.

Carmer himself was nowhere to be seen.

There was a feeling that this mission would be canceled like all the others and that this muddy wet dark world of combat would go on forever.

Visibility continued to be limited, and Greg was never able to get above a thousand feet.

It was going to be dangerous.

Forced to realize that this was the end of a very short line I scanned a road marker and discovered what the end of a slightly longer line would be for the old Mexican: Moriarty, New Mexico.

Over the rapidly-diminishing outline of a jump seat piled high with luggage Herry's black brushcut was just discernible, near, or enviably near that spot where -- hidden -- more delicately-textured, most beautifully tinted hair must still be streaming back in cool, oh cool wind sweetly perfumed with sagebrush and yucca flowers and engine fumes.