词汇：Indian

adj. 印度的；印第安人的；印第安语的

相关场景

“I see an Indian coming and I can’t tell if he’s friendly,” Augustus said. “He’s riding a pacing horse and that ain’t a good sign.” His old pistol was so heavy she had to use both hands to pass the gun belt to him.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Throughout his years as a Ranger, Augustus had always been renowned for his remarkable eyesight. Time and again, on the high plains and in the Pecos country, it had been proven that he could see farther than other people. In the shimmering mirages the men were always mistaking sage bushes for Indians. Call himself could shade his eyes and squint and still not be certain, but Augustus would merely glance at the supposed Indian for a moment, laugh and go back to card playing or whiskey drinking or whatever he might be doing.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
At night around the campfire there were always Indian stories being told, mostly by Mr. Gus. Once the crew had settled into the rhythm of night work, the Captain took to doing what he always done: he removed himself from the company a little distance. Almost every night he would catch the Hell Bitch and ride away. It puzzled some of the men.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Well, what’s the Indian situation in Texas then?” Roscoe asked. The soldiers seemed completely uninformed on the subject. They were from Missouri. All they knew about Indians was that they liked to do bad things to white captives. One mentioned that a soldier he knew had been shot with an arrow at such close range that the arrow went in one ear and the point came out the other side of the soldier’s head.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“It’s dern likely,” Augustus said. “If I can find a squaw I like, I’m apt to marry her. The thing is, if I’m going to be treated like an Indian, I might as well act like one. I think we spent our best years fighting on the wrong side.” Call didn’t want to argue with nonsense like that. They were nearly to the edge of town, passing a few adobe hovels where the poorer Mexicans lived. In one of them a baby cried. Call was relieved to be leaving. With Gus on the prod, anything could happen. In the country, if he got mad and shot something, it would probably be a snake, not a rude bartender.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Oh, now, John, I wouldn’t threaten these gentlemen if I was you,” Ned Tym said, appalled at what he was hearing. “This is Captain Call and Captain McCrae.” “Well, what’s that to me?” the man said, whirling on Ned. “I never heard of them and I won’t have these old cowboys coming in here and making this kind of mess.” “They ain’t old cowboys,” Ned said. “They’re Texas Rangers. You’ve heard of them. You’ve just forgot.” “I don’t know why I would have,” the man said. “I just lived here two years, miserable ones at that. I don’t necessarily keep up with every old-timer who ever shot at an Indian. It’s mostly tall tales anyway, just old men bragging on themselves.” “John, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ned said, growing more alarmed. “Captain Call and Captain McCrae would be the last ones to brag.” “Well, that’s your opinion,” John said. “They look like braggarts to me.” Call was beginning to feel annoyed, for the young man was giving them unmannerly looks and talking to them as if they were trash; but then it was partly Gus’s fault. The fact that the bartender had been a little slow and insolent hadn’t necessarily been a reason to break his nose. Gus was touchy about such things though. He enjoyed having been a famous Texas Ranger and was often put out if he didn’t receive all the praise he thought he had coming.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“It’s curious how things get in your head,” he said. “I’ve got an Indian in mine.” “I expect your ma told you you’d be stolt, when you was young,” Augustus said.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
It was true. The minute they left Lonesome Dove he had begun to have his big Indian dreams. The same big Indian he had dreamed about for years had come back to haunt his sleep. Sometimes just dozing on his horse he would dream about the Indian. He slept poorly, as a result, and felt he would be tired and good for nothing by the time they reached Montana.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
But the men avoided her, day or night—all except Fowler, who wandered the boat constantly. Once, standing beside her, he knelt suddenly and cocked his rifle, but what he thought was an Indian turned out to be a bush. “The heat’s got my eye jumping,” he said, spitting a brown stream of tobacco into the water.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Well, I hope nobody don’t rob the bank while I’m gone,” he said to the little crowd watching him. He wanted to suggest worse possibilities, such as Indian raids, but, in fact, the Indians had not molested Fort Smith in years, though the main reason he rode white horses was that he had heard somewhere that Indians were afraid of them.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“We’ll need to eat,” July said. “Joe can shoot a rabbit now and then if we don’t see no deer.” “You’ll probably see a Comanche Indian and they’ll cook both of you as if you was dern rabbits,” Roscoe said.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“That simple,” Call said. “I’ll scare off bandits and you can talk to Indian chiefs.” “You boys let these cattle string out,” he said to the men. “We ain’t in no big hurry.” Augustus had ridden through the cattle and had come back with a count of slightly over twenty-six hundred.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
The dreams had been so bad that he had already started sleeping with the unsheathed bowie knife in his hand, so he would be in the habit of it by the time they hit Indian country. This precaution caused certain problems for the young hands whose duty it was to wake him for his shift at night herding. It put them in danger of getting stabbed, a fact which troubled Jasper Fant particularly. Jasper was sensitive to danger. Usually he chose to wake Pea by kicking him in one foot, although even that wasn’t really safe—Pea was tall and who knew when he might snap up and make a lunge. Jasper had concluded that the best way would be to pelt him with small rocks, although such caution would only earn him the scornof the rest of the hands.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Jake, you are surly tonight,” Augustus said mildly. “I guess leaving the easy pickings around here has put you out of sorts.” Pea Eye was carefully whetting his bowie knife on the sole of one boot. Though they were still perfectly safe, as far as he knew, Pea had already begun to have bad dreams about the big Indian whose ferocity had haunted his sleep for years.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
He looked at Lorie for a minute, thinking that perhaps if he scared her with Indian stories she would change her mind.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
But he was convinced that Indians understood the moon. He had never talked with an Indian about it, but he knew they had more names for it than white people had, and that suggested a deeper understanding. The Indians were less busyand would naturally have more time to study such things. It had always seemed to Deets that it was lucky for the whites that the Indians had never gained full control over the moon. He had dreamed once, after the terrible battle of Fort Phantom Hill, that the Indians had managed to move the moon over by one of those little low hills that were all over west Texas. They had got it to pause by the edge of a mountain so they could leap their horses onto it. It still occurred to him at times that such a thing might have happened, and that there were Comanches or possibly Kiowa riding around on the moon. Often, when the moon was full and yellow, and close to the earth, he got the strong feeling that Indians were on it.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
The knowledge that the Captain was in the room with a whore struck Pea hard, sort of like the bullet that had hit him just behind the shoulder blades in the big Indian scrape up by Fort Phantom Hill. When the bullet hit he felt a solid whack and then sort of went numb in the brain—and it was the same with the notion that struck him as he was carrying the ax home from the saloon: Maggie was talking to the Captain in the privacy of her room, whereas so far as he knew no one had ever heard of the Captain doing more than occasionally tipping his hat to a lady if he met one in the street.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Remember Black Beaver, Gus?” he asked. “He’d know how far it was.” “I remember him,” Augustus said. “It was always a puzzle to me how such a short-legged Indian could cover so much ground.” “He claimed to have been all the way from the Columbia to the Rio Grande,” Call said. “That’s knowing the country, I’d say.” “Well, he was an Indian,” Augustus said. “He didn’t have to go along establishing law and order and making it safe for bankers and Sunday-school teachers, like we done. I guess that’s why you’re ready to head off to Montany. You want to help establish a few more banks.” “That’s aggravating,” Call said. “I ain’t a banker.” “No, but you’ve done many a banker a good turn,” Augustus said. “That’s what we done, you know. Kilt the dern Indians so they wouldn’t bother the bankers.” “They bothered more than bankers,” Call said.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Why, I don’t know,” Augustus said. “I’ve never given the matter no thought, and so far as I know you haven’t either. I do think we’re a shade old to do much Indian fighting.” “There won’t be much,” Call said. “You heard Jake. It’s the same up there as it is down here. The Indians will soon be whipped. And Jake does know good country when he sees it. It sounds like a cattleman’s paradise.” “No, it sounds like a goddamn wilderness,” Augustus said. “Why, there ain’t even a house to go to. I’ve slept on the ground enough for one life. Now I’m in the mood for a little civilization. I don’t have to have oprys and streetcars, but I do enjoy a decent bed and a roof to keep out the weather.” “He said there were fortunes to be made,” Call said. “It stands to reason he’s right. Somebody’s gonna settle it up and get that land. Suppose we got there first. We could buy you forty beds.” The surprising thing to Augustus was not just what Call was suggesting but how he sounded. For years Call had looked at life as if it were essentially over. Call had never been a man who could think of much reason for acting happy, but then he had always been one who knew his purpose. His purpose was to get done what needed to be done, and what needed to be done was simple, if not easy. The settlers of Texas needed protection, from Indians on the north and bandits on the south. As a Ranger, Call had had a job that fit him, and he had gone about the work with a vigor that would have passed for happiness in another man.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
In fact, it proved an impossible thing. She wouldn’t have him, or Jake either, and yet she married Bob Allen, a man so dumb he could hardly walk through a door without bumping his head. They soon went north; since then, Augustus had kept his ears open for news that she was widowed—he didn’t wish Clara any unpleasantness, but horse trading in Indian country was risky business. If Bob should meet an untimely end—as better men had—then he wanted to be the first to offer his assistance to the widow.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Augustus felt his own pangs—irked, mainly, that Jake had had a glimpse of Clara, whereas he himself had to make do with an occasional scrap of gossip. At sixteen she had been so pretty it took your breath, and smart too—a girl with some sand, as she had quickly shown when both her parents had been killed in the big Indian raid of ’56, the worst ever to rake that part of the country. Clara had been in school in San Antonio when it happened, but she came right back to Austin and ranthe store her parents had started—the Indians had tried to set fire to it but for some reason it didn’t catch.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“We found that coat in an abandoned cabin up on the Brazos,” Augustus said. “I guess the settlers that run out decided it was too heavy to carry. It weighed as much as a good-sized sheep, which is why Call gave it to Deets. He was the only one of us stout enough to carry it all day. Don’t you remember that, Jake? It was the time we had that scrape up by Fort Phantom Hill.” “I remember a scrape, but the rest is kinda cloudy,” Jake said. “I guess all you boys have got to do is sit around and talk about old times. I’m young yet, Gus. I got a living to make.” In fact, what he did remember was being scared every time they crossed the Brazos, since it would just be ten or twelve of them and no reason not to think they would run into a hundred Comanches or Kiowas. He would have been glad to quit rangering if he could have thought of a way to do it that wouldn’t look bad, but there was no way. In the end he came through twelve Indian fights and many scrapes with bandits only to get in real trouble in Fort Smith, Arkansas, as safe a town as you could find.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“He heads for the river because he’s tired of hearing us yap,” he said. “He ain’t a sociable man and never was. You could never keep him in camp, once he had his grub. He’d rather sit off in the dark and prime his gun. I doubt he’d find an Indian if one was out there.” “He used to find them,” Pea said. “He found that big gang of them up by Fort Phantom Hill.” “’I god, Pea,” Augustus said. “Of course he found a few here and there. They used to be thicker than grass burrs, if you remember. I’ll guarantee he won’t scratch up none tonight. Call’s got to be the one to out-suffer everybody, that’s the pint. I won’t say he’s a man to hunt glory like some I’ve knowed. Glory don’t interest Call. He’s just got to do his duty nine times over or he don’t sleep good.” There was a pause. Pea Eye had always been uncomfortable with Gus’s criticisms of the Captain, without having any idea how to answer them. If he came back at all he usually just adopted one of the Captain’s own remarks.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Why, they could come,” he said. “The Captain’s right to watch. If I wasn’t so lazy I’d go help him.” “He don’t want you to help him,” Augustus said testily. Pea’s blind loyalty to Call was sometimes a trial. He himself knew perfectly well why Call headed for the river every night, and it had very little to do with the Indian threat. He had made the point many times, but he made it again.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Mention of Indians woke Pea Eye from an alcoholic doze. He hated Indians, partly because for thirty years fear of them had kept him from getting a good night’s sleep. In his years with the Rangers he never closed his eyes without expecting to open them and find some huge Indian getting ready to poke him with something sharp. Most of the Indians he had actually seen had all been scrawny little men, but it didn’t mean the huge one who haunted his sleep wasn’t out there waiting.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇