It could be some kind of trick Budd had thought up.

) 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.

They, and the two large fans which I could dimly see as daylight filtered through their vents, down at the far end of the hall, could be turned on by a master switch situated inside the office.

Their roar, like the swelling volume of a hundred tornadoes could be heard for miles.

Atonement, if atonement were possible, could only be made at that sacred, sacrificial basin.

Bushes and vines abetted the rocks in forming thorny detours for the struggling stranger, and without the direct light of the sun to act as compass, Pamela could no longer be positive of her direction.

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

And even with her limited knowledge of such things, she knew that the car could be repaired there ; ;

Not even an empty cartridge case could be found.

Inside the crown, stuffed behind the stained sweatband, could be seen thin, crumpled wads of currency.

How much of an accident could that be ''??

So far as he knew, only his father could be there.

A hell of an altitude for a barrel roll, but it could be done.

With the rapid rate of closure, the approach from below, the side, and ahead, there would be only a moment when damage could be done.

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 ; ;

The entire length of the street could be raked with rifle fire from this barn.

When he awoke in the mornings, she was in his mind and he could hardly wait to get to school to be near her in the flesh.

It is hard to see how the situation could be otherwise.

Each could be the real thing.

Officers who participate in the continual practice drills assured me that the President's decision could be made and announced on the gold circuit within minutes after the first flash from Aj.

Seeking an obscure, dark, relatively quiet corner in the airy room otherwise suffused with afternoon sunshine, he asked if the soft background music could be turned off.

Faulkner culminates the Southern legend perhaps more masterfully than it has ever been, or could ever be, done.

The conversation that ensued may have been engrossing but it could hardly be called world-shattering.

If I could make myself feel the same way

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.

At the same time, I am aware that my recoil could be interpreted by readers of the tea leaves at the bottom of my psyche as an incestuous sign, since theirs is a science of paradox: if one hates, they say it is because one loves ; ;

`` I couldn't write with them in the same room with me, but I could with Harold.

It could go either way, since the gains for both points of view were about the same.

After a pause, during which he studied Scotty's face as if Scotty were not there and could not study him too, Mr. McKinley would ask the same questions he had asked downstairs.

You couldn't on the one hand decry the arts and at the same time practice them, could you??

As long as there were two human beings working together on the same project, there would be competition and you could no more escape it than you could expect to escape the grave.

He could no longer build anything, whether a private residence in his Pennsylvania county or a church in Brazil, without it being obvious that he had done it, and while here and there he was taken to task for again developing the same airy technique, they were such fanciful and sometimes even playful buildings that the public felt assured by its sense of recognition after a time, a quality of authentic uniqueness about them, which, once established by an artist as his private vision, is no longer disputable as to its other values.

The same shelter could be built into an embankment or below ground level.

It would be even more valuable because that same aircraft could immediately destroy any targets it discovered -- no need to wait for a missile to come all the way from the United States with the chance that the target, if it were mobile, would be gone.

We quickly ran into the same trouble that plagued Bill Ruger in his first experiments: Three or four bullets would be placed well in a six-inch bull at 100 yards and then, unaccountably, one could stray far out of the group.

Following observation of the fact that the reaction rates of supposedly identical reaction mixtures prepared on the same filling manifold and exposed under identical conditions often differed by several hundred per cent, a systematic series of experiments was undertaken to see whether the difficulty could be ascribed to the method of preparing the chlorine, to the effects of oxygen or moisture or to the effect of surface to volume ratio in the reaction tubes.

From here they proceeded to ( 3 ) These same areas in relation to their own future family life stages, developing these to the extent of examining various crises which could be expected to confront them at some time or other.

As one would surmise, the procedure, however, could be repeated with the same object or with the same type of object often enough, so that the corresponding visual blots and the merest beginning of the tracing movement would provide clues as to the actual shape, which the patient then immediately could determine by a kind of inference.

The same could be said for the song to which they make their entrance in the final scene.

Other synonyms could of course serve the same function, and for the sake of ease I shall speak of kennings and epithets in the widest and loosest possible sense, and name, for example, Gar-Dene a kenning for the Danes.

A refrigerated item could also be heated and served in less time than is required for frozen foods of the same type.

A brisk, amusing man, apparently constructed on an ingenious system of spring-joints attuned to the same peppery rhythm as his mind, Smith began his academic career teaching speech to Barnard girls -- a project considerably enlivened by his devotion to a recording about `` a young rat named Arthur, who never could make up his mind ''.

The radio broadcasts themselves were often so patiently informative, despite the baseball jargon, that girls and women could begin to store up in their minds the same sort of random and meaningless statistics that small boys had long learned better than they ever did their lessons in school.