It was the only thing in his life for which he felt guilt.

His looting of the orderly room had taken only a minute or two and the vicinity was still clear of guerrillas.

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 fire had gone down, and the man was only a shadow against the trees.

There was only one place where Jake Carwood's description had gone badly awry: the peace and quiet.

It was the only thing about her that was the least bit hard to remember.

under the circumstances I was only too willing to confess all.

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

On a shelf in the office behind the counter was a small radio dialed permanently on a station which broadcast only vulgar commercials and cheap popular music.

Once, pressing him, I learned that his job was only part-time, in the afternoons when nothing went on in the hall.

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

The river was only a few blocks away but an unbroken line of piers prevented me from seeing it.

Although it was dark as usual I could see that the hall had only recently contained a great many people.

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.

The only reason we brought you was to get Miller out.

The only thing which would have attracted attention was that two wore the uniform of prison guards, three the striped suits of convicts.

He had belonged to this land and, perhaps, had desecrated it -- and this was the only material symbol that remained of him.

There was only one place where the mountain might receive her -- that unnamed, unnameable pool harbored in its secret bosom.

Now, he could only play the last card in what was probably the world's coldest deck.

He was only vaguely aware of the sluicing rain.

He paused only long enough to ascertain that Jess's buckskin was still missing and that his own gray was all right, then climbed through a back window and dropped to the ground outside.

There was no lock on the door, only an iron hook which he unfastened.

Again he stood in the darkness listening, but there was only the scrape of a shod hoof on a plank floor.

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.