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.

My wish to meet Samuel Beckett had been prompted by simple curiosity and interest in his work.

There is evidence to suggest, in fact, that many authors of the humorous sketches were prompted to write them -- or to make them as indelicate as they are -- by way of protesting against the artificial refinements which had come to dominate the polite letters of the South.

This upset the delicate balance of Durrani tribal politics that Ahmad Shah had established and may have prompted Painda Khan and other Durrani chiefs to plot against the shah.

The academy had a well-stocked library that prompted Babbage's love of mathematics.

This has prompted suspicion that Omega Centauri was the core of a dwarf galaxy that had been absorbed by the Milky Way.

The team's uniforms prompted a 2003 lawsuit by the Oakland Raiders, who claimed that the NFL and the Panthers had infringed upon key trademark elements of the Raiders ' brand, specifically the silver and black colors.

du Motel had confided some of her troubles to Galois, and this might have prompted him to provoke the duel himself on her behalf.

The growing fame of Ely Culbertson, however, prompted Goren to abandon his original career choice to pursue bridge competitions, where he attracted the attention of Milton Work, who had developed the Work Point Count system.

This prompted a refutation later that year by Samuel Gardiner, who argued that Gerard had gone too far in trying to " wipe away the reproach " which the plot had exacted on generations of English Catholics.

Archaeological evidence shows that Senecio had been rebuilding the defences of Hadrian's Wall and the forts beyond it, and Severus ' arrival in Britain prompted the enemy tribes to sue for peace immediately.

Personal networks of family and friends who had gone ahead and wrote back, or sent money, prompted emigrants to retrace their paths.

He won the league's Most Valuable Player Award and had such a dominant year that one sportswriter was prompted to say, " Henry Aaron led the league in everything except hotel accommodations.

Meanwhile, the succession crisis had prompted a mission to the west to seek assistance.

The church had previously been criticized for its policy during the civil rights movement, but the change came in 1978 and was prompted primarily by problems facing mixed race converts in Brazil.

North Korea's desire to lessen its dependence on aid from China and the Soviet Union prompted the expansion of its military power, which had begun in the second half of the 1960s.

However, ten years of exile usually resolved whatever had prompted the expulsion.

Itaipú had prompted a tidal wave of Brazilian migration in the eastern border region of Paraguay.

Additionally the remarkably low price for which Daimler-Benz had been allowed to secure their plot had prompted questions from the Berlin Auditor-General's office and the European Union in Brussels, after which Daimler-Benz were billed for an additional sum.

In 1811, prompted by discussions with a Chinese student about Chinese script, Silvestre de Sacy considered a suggestion made by Georg Zoëga in 1797 that the foreign names in Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions might be written phonetically ; he also recalled that as long ago as 1761, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy had suggested that the characters enclosed in cartouches in hieroglyphic inscriptions were proper names.

This prompted an unsuccessful bid by Britain in 1956 to buy back the Somali lands it had turned over.

This prompted an unsuccessful bid by Britain in 1956 to buy back the Somali lands it had turned over.

Among the things that prompted Cousteau to develop efficient air-breathing free-swimming diving gear, were two oxygen toxicity accidents that he had in 1939 with rebreathers, the first at 17 metres deep, but those accidents happened because he went too deep with pure oxygen.

Henry's concern about having an heir to secure his family line and increase his security while alive would have prompted him to ask for a divorce sooner or later, whether Anne had precipitated it or not.