`` I don't have many strays coming to my front door '', he said.

`` I mean, we don't have any way to get there and we can't expect you to quit work just to take us to town ''.

There's someone there I have to see.

I have to think about it.

We'll still have the rifle, and I might be able to round up some more.

As I dug in behind one of the bales we were using as protection, I grudgingly found myself agreeing with Oso's logic, especially when I imagined what would have happened to Missy if Old Knife's large party of screeching warriors had overrun our company.

I have it with me, right here.

) hung on a hook on the wall, and underneath it I could see his tie, knotted, ready to be slipped over his head, a black badge of frayed respectability that ought never to have left his neck.

I was at once disappointed, although just what I had expected him to look like I could not have explained.

As he lowered himself on the chair behind his desk I wondered what this dapper, slightly ridiculous man could possibly have to do with the workings of the hall.

But, by gosh, I want him and I'm going to have him!!

Don't like to bother no one unless we have to, which I figger we do, in your case.

`` I have a little job for you, Charlie.

`` You and I have a little talking to do, Jess.

I would have foregone my romantic chances rather than leave a friend sweltering and dusty and -- Well, at least I wouldn't have shouted back a taunt.

At once my ears were drowned by a flow of what I took to be Spanish, but -- the driver's white teeth flashing at me, the road wildly veering beyond his glistening hair, beyond his gesticulating bottle -- it could have been the purest Oxford English I was half hearing ; ;

I wouldn't have known the difference.

`` I never felt better in my life '', Fiske blustered.

I would turn away from my writing in the hope of getting a good look at them but I never quite succeeded.

For weeks I wandered about this neighborhood of warehouses and garages, truck terminals and taxi repair shops, gasoline pumps and longshoremen's lunch counters, yet never did I cease to feel myself a stranger there.

`` I never saw him.

But there's one thing I never seen or heard of, one thing I just don't think there is, and that's a sportin' way o' killin' a man ''!!

I never wear anything at all.

`` No, I never did see his face.

I can never pronounce it ''.

Though I had a great dread of the island and felt I would never leave it alive, I eagerly wrote down everything she told me about its women.

Never, never did I offer him the exclusive rights.

`` I never heard that ''.

I never heard of a poll being taken on the question.

`` As an independent American I considered all who were not for us, and you amongst the rest, as against us, yet be assured that John Jay never ceased to be the friend of Peter Van Schaack ''.

His first inaugural address speaks of `` my country whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love ''.

But I would never have thought of it myself ''.

Then, after overtures to accept a settlement and go through with a divorce, Miriam gave a ghastly echo of Mrs. Micawber by suddenly stating, `` I will never leave Mr. Wright ''.

From her California headquarters, Miriam fired back, `` I shall never divorce Mr. Wright, to permit him to marry Olga Milanoff ''.

), I have never wanted to know what you knew of passion.

You probably would not remember, since you never seemed to remember even the same moments as I, much less their intensity, one sunny midday on Fifth Avenue when you had set out with me for some final shopping less than a week before the wedding you staged for me with such reluctance at the Farm.

When I asked him what, if anything, I could do about it, he surprised me by referring me to the director of the hall.

Was I sure, he asked, that I knew what I was applying for??

I asked Rawlins.

`` Why '', he went on, `` when Rob asked me if he could make his dive on this trip, I didn't think twice about it.

I have just asked these questions in the Pentagon, in the White House, in offices of key scientists across the country and aboard the submarines that prowl for months underwater, with neat rows of green launch tubes which contain Polaris missiles and which are affectionately known as `` Sherwood Forest ''.

I asked the same questions inside the launch-control rooms of an Atlas missile base in Wyoming, where officers who wear sidearms are manning the `` commit buttons '' that could start a war -- accidentally or by design -- and in the command centers where other pistol-packing men could give orders to push such buttons.

I asked Wisman what would happen if he broke out the go codes and tried to start transmitting one.

I asked.

How, I asked, could chaos be admitted to chaos??

I asked about the battle between life and death in his plays.

Given a theological lead, I asked what he thinks about those who find a religious significance to his plays.

At a party an English intellectual -- so-called -- asked me why I write always about distress.

I was having lunch not long ago ( apologies to N. V. Peale ) with three distinguished historians ( one specializing in the European Middle Ages, one in American history, and one in the Far East ), and I asked them if they could name instances where the general mores had been radically changed with `` deliberate speed, majestic instancy '' ( Francis Thompson's words for the Hound Of Heaven's Pursuit ) by judicial fiat.

Just as I was about to enlarge upon my discovery of the underside of the leaf of love, memory, displeased at being asked to yield its unsavory secrets, dashed ahead of me, calling back over its shoulder: `` Skip it.

The waspish man stopped me three paces from the bicycle barricade, and asked me in French if I had papers to leave France.

I asked him.

I asked.

One of the girl students, sitting by while I ate the thick soup, asked me if I had a sleeping bag.

I asked him.

Once or twice my father asked me if I wasn't overdoing a bit in my churchgoing.