词汇：story

n. 故事；来历；新闻报道；小说；[口]假话

相关场景

THE KID:

I'm telling you you're messing up the story, now get it right!>>完整场景

DISSOLVE TO: The story he's reading about, as the monochromatic look of the bedroom is replaced by the dazzling color of the English countryside.>>完整场景

“I’ll work for you,” the boy added. “I can blacksmith. I worked two years at a forge back in Missouri, before we left.” Call knew there was not a decent tree in miles. It would be a hardship on them to ride along with the boy for a day in order to hang him. Besides, they needed a blacksmith. As for the boy’s story, maybe it was true and maybe it wasn’t. The old man had appeared to be mad, but Call had seen many thieves act that way in hopes that it would save them.>>完整场景

So Call agreed, and Newt stayed at the fort a month, breaking horses. The weather improved. It was cold, but the days were often fine and sunny. Newt’s only scare came when he took a strong sorrel gelding out of the fort for his first ride and the horse took the bit between his teeth and raced out onto the Missouri ice. When the horse hit the ice he slipped and, though he crashed through the ice, fortunately they were in shallow water and Newt was able to struggle out and lead the horse out too. A few soldiers coming in with a load of wood helped him get dry. Newt knew it would have been a different story if the horse had made it to the center of the river before breaking through the ice.>>完整场景

Call nodded. He knew he would have to tell the story, but didn’t want to have to tell it a dozen times. He trotted on over to the wagon, which Lippy was driving. Pea Eye sat in the back end, resting. He was still barefoot, though Call saw at once that his feet were better. When he saw Call riding in alone he looked worried.>>完整场景

“Yes, me,” Call said. “Why not me?” “I take it back, Woodrow,” Augustus said. “I have no doubt you’ll miss me. You’ll probably die of boredom this winter and I’ll never get to Clara’s orchard.” “Why do you call it that?” “We had picnics there,” Augustus said. “I took to calling it that. It pleased Clara. I could please her oftener in those days.” “Well, but is that any reason to go so far to be buried?” Call said. “She’d allow you a grave in Nebraska, I’m sure.” “Yes, but we had our happiness in Texas,” Augustus said. “It was my best happiness, too. If you’re too lazy to take me to Texas, then just throw me out the window and be done with it.” He spoke with vehemence. “She’s got her family in Nebraska,” Augustus added, more quietly. “I don’t want to lie there with that dumb horse trader she married.” “This would make a story if there was anybody to tell it,” Call said. “You want me to carry your body three thousand miles because you used to go picnicking with a girl on the Guadalupe River?” “That, plus I want to see if you can do it,” Augustus said.>>完整场景

It was one of those who had brought July the news about his wife, although of course the soldier didn’t know it was July’s wife when he talked about finding the corpses of the woman and the buffalo hunter. Clara had been washing clothes and hadn’t heard the story, but when she went down to the lots a little later she knew something was wrong. July stood by the fence, white as a sheet.>>完整场景

“Oh, did you follow that story?” the doctor said. “Hung him right on schedule about a week after they brought you in.>>完整场景

“If you’d like a wash first, I’ll have the girls draw some water,” Clara said. “I didn’t get your name.” “I’m July Johnson,” July said. “I come from Arkansas.” Clara almost dropped the poker. The girls had told her the little scarfaced man had said the woman they were with was married to a sheriff named Johnson, from Arkansas. She hadn’t given the story much credence—the woman didn’t strike her as the marrying type. Besides, the little man had whispered something to the effect that the big buffalo hunter considered himself married to her. The girls thought it mighty exciting, having a woman in the house who was married to two men. And if that wasn’t complicated enough, the woman herself claimed to be married to Dee Boot, the gunfighter they had hung last week. Cholo had been in town when the hanging took place and reported that the hanging had gone smoothly.>>完整场景

“Bad men would have a better team,” Clara said. “Find any colts?” Cholo shook his head. His hair was white—Clara had never been able to get his age out of him, but she imagined he was seventy-five at least, perhaps eighty. At night by the fire, with the work done, Cholo wove horsehair lariats. Clara loved to watch the way his fingers worked. When a horse died or had to be killed, Cholo always saved its mane and tail for his ropes. He could weave them of rawhide too, and once had made one for her of buckskin, although she didn’t rope. Bob had been puzzled by the gift—“Clara couldn’t rope a post,” he said—but Clara was not puzzled at all. She had been very pleased. It was a beautiful gift; Cholo had the finest manners. She knew he appreciated her as she appreciated him. That was the year she bought him the coat. Sometimes, reading her magazines, she would look up and see Cholo weaving a rope and imagine that if she ever did try to write a story she would write it about him. It would be very different from any of the stories she read in the English magazines.>>完整场景

“I tell you we bought them horses!” Dan said.“Oh, drop your bluff,” Augustus said. “I buried Wilbarger myself, not to mention his two cowboys. We buried them farmers and we’ll bury that body over there. I imagine it’s all your doings, too. Your brothers don’t look so rough, and Jake ain’t normally a killer.” Augustus looked at Jake, who was still sitting down. “What’s the story on that one, Jake?” he asked.>>完整场景

Lippy soon went back to the wagon, subdued by his own indiscretion, but not before assuring Dish that the story would go no further.>>完整场景

“Oh, the closest one to Dodge,” Dan said. “Find some herd that’s just about there and steal it, maybe a day or two shy of the towns. Then we could just drive it in and sell it and be gone. We’d get all the money and none of the work.” “What about the boys who drove it all that way?” Jake asked. “They might not want to give up their profits that easy.” “We’d plant ’em,” Dan said. “Shoot them and sell their cattle, and be long gone before anyone ever missed them.” “What if one run off and didn’t get planted?” Roy said. “It don’t take but one to tell the story, and then we’d have a posse to fight.” “Frog’s got a fast horse,” Dan said. “He could run down any man who escaped.” “I’d rather rob banks, myself,” little Eddie said. “Then you got the money right in your hands. You don’t have to sell no cows.” “Well, you’re lazy, Ed,” Dan said, looking at his brother as if he were mad enough to shoot him. In fact, the Suggs brothers seemed to live on the edge of fratricidal warfare.>>完整场景

ALMOST AT ONCE, before the group even got out of Texas, Jake had cause to regret that he had ever agreed to ride with the Suggs brothers. The first night he camped with them, not thirty miles north of Dallas, he heard talk that frightened him. The boys were discussing two outlaws who were in jail in Fort Worth, waiting to hang, and Dan Suggs claimed it was July Johnson who had brought them in. The robbers had put out the story that July was traveling with a young girl who could throw rocks better than most men could shoot.>>完整场景

He saw the girl come out of the tent when Gus dismounted. She was just a shape in the twilight. Gus said she wouldn’t talk much, not even to him. Call didn’t intend to try her. He loped a mile or two to the west and put the mare on her lead rope. The sky overhead was still light and there was a little fingernail moon.JAKE SPENT MOST of his days in a place called Bill’s Saloon, a little clapboard place on the Trinity River bluffs. It was a two- story building. The whores took the top story and the gamblers and cowboys used the bottom. From the top floor there were usually cattle in sight trailing north, small herds and large. Once in a while a foreman came in for liquor and met Jake. When they found out he had been north to Montana, some tried to hire him, but Jake just laughed at them. The week after he left, the Hat Creek herd had been a good week. He couldn’t draw a bad card, and by the time the week was over he had a stake enough to last him a month or two.>>完整场景

“I swear, Gus, we near give you up,” Pea Eye said. “Did you catch the bandit?” “No, but I hope I do someday,” Augustus said. “I met plenty of his friends, but he slipped by me.” “Did you get to town or what?” Dish asked. “You didn’t have no tent when you rode off.” “Mr. Wilbarger loaned me that tent,” Augustus said. “Lorie’s feeling shy and she needs a little privacy.” “We best get the wagon across,” Call said. “We can listen to Gus’s story later. You boys that ain’t dressed go back and help.” The sun came out, and that plus Gus’s arrival put the hands in a high mood. Even Jasper, normally so worried about rivers, forgot his fear and swam right back across the Canadian to help get the wagon. They all treated swimming the river like a frolic, though they had been anxious about it for a week. Before long they had the wagon across. They had put both pigs in it but the blue shoat jumped out and swam across.>>完整场景

“I dream about them,” Janey said, not reassured. “They just keep coming, and I can’t run.” Except for snapping turtles and sleep, she seemed to fear nothing. Many times coiled rattlers would sing at them as they traveled, and Janey would never give the snakes a glance. Old Memphis was more nervous about snakes than she was, and Roscoe more nervous than either one of them. He had once heard of a man being bitten by a rattlesnake that had gotten up in a tree. According to the story, the snake had dropped right off a limb and onto the man and had bitten him in the neck. Roscoe imagined how unpleasant it could be to have a snake drop on one’s neck—he took care to ride under as few limbs as possible and was glad to see the trees thinning out as they rode west.>>完整场景

“What’s the story on this July?” Louisa asked. “That wife of his sounds like a woman of ill fame. What kind of sheriff would marry a woman of ill fame?” “Well, July’s slow,” Roscoe said. “He’s the sort that don’t talk much.” “Oh, that sort,” Louisa said. “The opposite of my late husband, Jim.” She took a pair of men’s brogans from beside the table and began to lace them on her bare feet.>>完整场景

She just had a dusty little room in a boardinghouse in St. Jo, and the boy a cubbyhole in the attic. Dee snuck in twice, in the dead of night, so as not to tarnish her reputation. He liked Joe, too, and had the notion that he ought to grow up to be something. It was the last time she saw Dee that they had worked out the smallpox story.>>完整场景

“Take ’em,” the widow Spettle said, looking at her boys as if she wondered why she’d borne them. “I reckon they’ll work as hard as any.” Call knew the boys had helped take a small herd to Arkansas. He paid the widow a month’s wage for each boy, knowing she would need it. There was evidently not a shoe in the family—even the mother was barefoot, a fact that must shame her, if the servant story were true.>>完整场景

When she got through with her story, he explained that he had killed a dentist in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and was a wanted man, but that he had hopes of eluding the law, and if he did, he would certainly try to see that she got to San Francisco, where she belonged. The way he said it made a big impression on Lorie. A sad tone came into his voice from time to time, as if it pained him to have to remember that mortality could prevent him from doing her such a favor. He sounded like he expected to die, and probably soon. It wasn’t a whine, either—just a low note off his tongue and a look in his eye; it didn’t interrupt for a minute his ability to enjoy the immediate pleasures of life.>>完整场景

If caught, he knew he could expect no mercy. The only thing in his favor was that there didn’t seem to be any trees around to hang him from! Mr. Gus had once told a story about a horsethief who had to be hung from the rafter of a bam because there were no trees, but so far as Newt could tell there were no barns in Mexico either. The only thing he knew clearly was that he was scared. He rode for several miles, feeling very apprehensive. The thought of hanging—a new thought—wouldn’t leave his mind. It became so powerful at one point that he squeezed his throat with one hand, to get a little notion of how it felt not to breathe. It didn’t feel so bad when it was just his hand, but he knew a rope would feel a lot worse.>>完整场景

“That would be a long story,” Allen said. “Are we far from Galveston? That was our destination.” “You overshot it by a wide mark,” Call said. “This hut you’re resting in belongs to a man named Pedro Flores. He ain’t a gentle man, and if he finds you tomorrow I expect he’ll hang you.” “Oh, he will,” Deets agreed. “He’ll be mad tomorrow.” “Fine, we’ll go with you,” Allen said. He courteously offered the bottle to both Deets and Newt, and when they refused drained it with one gulp and flung it into the darkness.>>完整场景

But it was Jake’s luck that most of the men who saw him make the shot were raw boys too, with not enough judgment to appreciate how lucky a thing it was. Those that survived and grew up told the story all across the West, so there was hardly a man from the Mexican border to Canada who hadn’t heard what a dead pistol shot Jake Spoon was, though any man who had fought with him through the years would know he was no shot at all with a pistol and only a fair shot with a rifle.>>完整场景

“Once you left, our standards slipped,” Augustus said. “The majority of this outfit ain’t interested in refinements.” “That’s plain,” Jake said. “There’s a damn pig on the back porch. What about them biscuits?” “Much as I’ve missed you, I ain’t overworking my sourdough just because you and Deets couldn’t manage to get here in time,” Augustus said. “What I will do is fry some meat.” He fried it, and Jake and Deets ate it, while Bolivar sat in the corner and sulked at the thought of two more breakfasts to wash up after. It amused Augustus to watch Jake eat—he was so fastidious about it—but the sight put Call into a black fidget. Jake could spend twenty minutes picking at some eggs and a bit of bacon. It was obvious to Augustus that Call was trying to be polite and let Jake get some food in his belly before he told his story, but Call was not a patient man and had already controlled his urge to get to work longer than was usual. He stood in the door, watching the whitening sky and looking restless enough to bite himself.>>完整场景