He found that if he was tired enough at night, he went to sleep simply because he was too exhausted to stay awake.

Dawn would come soon and the night was at its coldest.

And he was fleeing, running -- fleeing his death and his life at the same time.

Then he was on his way at a gallop.

He scuttled in shadow along the east wall of the stockade and then followed the south wall until he was at the rear of the two frame buildings.

A man was standing in the open door of the lighted orderly room a few yards to Mike's left, but he, too, suddenly made up his mind and went racing to join the confused activity at the east end of the stockade.

Next to him was a young boy I was sure had sat near me at one of the trading sessions.

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

I was nearly thirty at the time.

only the counter at one end was lighted by a long fluorescent tube suspended directly above it.

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

This desire, I went on, growing voluble as my conviction was aroused, had mounted at such a rate recently that I now found its realization necessary not only to my physical but also to my spiritual wellbeing.

Facing the forest now, she who had not dared to enter it before, walked between two trees at random and headed in what she believed was the direction of the pool.

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.

laughing at a dying man, laughing as a man was beaten to death.

He'd started a fire and put coffee on, and now was busy at the work board of his chuck wagon.

Hank had gathered wood for a cookfire, and his wife was busy at it now.

Tom Horn was soon back at work, giving his secret employers their money's worth.

Haying time was close at hand, and they needed some strong branches to repair a hay rack.

`` It was Brenner's idea '', Jess mumbled, dabbing at his nose.

Seeing them waiting there at the foot of Emigrant Rock was so overwhelming that, for a good minute after they rounded the bend and started down the grade leading toward them, Matilda could not speak at all.

In the brief moment I had to talk to them before I took my post on the ring of defenses, I indicated I was sickened by the methods men employed to live and trade on the river.

Such was my state of mind that I did not question the possibility of this ; ;

Now, here was something of obvious importance to me, yet when I reached for the tickets he snatched them away from my hand.

I decided to see no more of the clerk until the processing of my papers was completed.

Though only a relatively short walk separated it from my own part of town, its character was wholly foreign to me.

At last, when I put it to him directly, the clerk was forced to admit that the delay in my case was unusual.

He had looked over my forms and was impressed by what he had seen there ; ;

I was just doing my job, just following orders, and for that he's going to kill me.

I seized the rack and made a western-style flying-mount just in time, one of my knees mercifully landing on my duffel bag -- and merely wrecking my camera, I was to discover later -- my other knee landing on the slivery truck floor boards and -- but this is no medical report.

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.

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 ; ;

Just as I got to my knees, there was again the sound of the fence stretching, and I had time only to start taking my kneeling posture seriously.

Miraculously, the bottle was still in my hand, foam still geysering over my ( luckily ) waterproof watch.

The Indian was again raising his bottle, but to my astonished relief -- probably only a fraction of Johnson's -- the bottle this time went to the Indian's lips.

There was a blur just under my focus of vision, a crash ; ;

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.

But her prettiness was what he had noticed first, and all the other things had come afterward: cruelty, meanness, self-will.

There was an artificial lake just out of sight in the first stand of trees, fed by a half dozen springs that popped out of the ground above the hillside orchard.

The first part of the road was steep, but it leveled off after the second bend and curled gradually into the valley.

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.

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

Once again, Tom Horn was the first and most likely suspect, and he was brought in for questioning immediately.

For Matilda, it was the first she had known in many a night.

Even the knowledge that she was losing another boy, as a mother always does when a marriage is made, did not prevent her from having the first carefree, dreamless sleep that she had known since they dropped down the canyon and into Bear Valley, way, way back there when they were crossing those other mountains.

Stevens was grunting over the last empty pocket when Russ abruptly rose and lunged toward Carmer's hat, which had tumbled half-a-dozen feet away when he first fell.

The Indian's arm whipped sidewise -- there was a flash of amber and froth, the crash of the bottle shattering against the side of the first car.

It was her first smile.

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

Hell, I gave him the first decent job he ever had, six, seven -- how many years ago was it, Rob ''??

Miss Langford ( her first name was Evelyn ) was an attractive girl.

School began in August, the hottest part of the year, and for the first few days Miss Langford was very lenient with the children, letting them play a lot and the new ones sort of get acquainted with one another.

It was just as well that the ignorant Dandy enjoyed himself to the hilt that first evening, for the room was to become his prison cell.

`` Bastards '', he would say, `` all I did was put a beat to that Vivaldi stuff, and the first chair clobbered me ''!!

In 1961 the first important legislative victory of the Kennedy Administration came when the principle of national responsibility for local economic distress won out over a `` state's-responsibility '' proposal -- provision was made for payment for unemployment relief by nation-wide taxation rather than by a levy only on those states afflicted with manpower surplus.

The first systematic thinking about this Pandora's box within Pandora's boxes was done four years ago by Fred Ikle, a frail, meek-mannered Swiss-born sociologist.

The smell at first was more surprising than unpleasant.

His collaboration with Washington, begun when he was the general's aide during the Revolution, was resumed when he entered the first Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury.