词汇：hour

n. 小时；钟头；课时；…点钟

相关场景

“It’s a soggy situation, I admit,” Augustus said, as if reading Pea Eye’s thoughts. “But it ain’t fatal yet. I could hold out here for a few days. Call could make it back to this creek in one ride on that feisty mare of his. Best thing for you to do would be just to travel at night. If you walk around in the daytime, some of these red boys might spot you and you’d have about the chance of a rabbit. I guess you could make it to the Yellowstone in three nights, though, and they ought to be there by then.” Pea Eye dreaded the prospect. He hated night travel, and it would be worse afoot. He began to hope that maybe the rainhad discouraged the Indians, but that hope only lasted an hour. Three times during the day the Indians fired on them.>>完整场景

While he was waiting, pistol cocked, to see if the Indians would try to rush them, he heard thunder. Within half an hour lightning was striking all around them, and thunder crashing.>>完整场景

Augustus, however, listened with appreciation. The war cries continued for an hour. In a lull, Augustus cupped his hands and let out a long, loud cry himself. He kept it up until he ran out of breath. Pea Eye had never heard Augustus yell like that and hardly knew what to make of it. It sounded exactly like a Comanche war cry.>>完整场景

“Let’s dig,” Augustus said, and began to work with his knife to create a shallow cave under the bank. They worked furiously for half an hour until both were drenched with sweat and covered with dirt. Augustus used the stock of the Indian boy’s carbine as a rude shovel and tried to shape the dirt they raked out into low breastworks on either side of the cave. They watched as best they could, but saw no Indians.>>完整场景

Then Pea heard the sound of a running horse and looked for Gus, supposing he had jumped another little bunch of buffalo. What he saw froze him instantly in place. Gus was racing down the little slope he had just gone up, with at least twenty mounted Indians hot on his heels. He must have ridden right into them. The Indians were shooting both guns and arrows. A bullet cut the grass ahead of Pea and he yanked out his rifle and popped a shot back at the Indians before whirling his horse and fleeing. Gus and he had crossed a good-sized creek less than an hour back, with some trees along it and some weeds and shrubbery in the creek bed. He assumed Gus must be racing for that, since it was the only shelter on the wide prairie. Even as he started, Pea saw five or six Indians veer toward him. He swerved over to. join Gus, who had two arrows in his leg. Gus was flailing his horse with his rifle barrel and the horse was running full out.>>完整场景

It was a beautiful morning, crisp for an hour or two and then sunny and warm. The country rolled on to the north, as it had for thousands of miles, brown in the distance, the prairie grass waving in the breeze.>>完整场景

Cholo was watching her to see if she was hurt. He loved Clara completely and tried in small ways to make life easier for her, although he had concluded long before that she wasn’t seeking ease. Often in the morning when she came down to the lots she would be somber and would stand by the fence for an hour, not saying a word to anyone. Other times there would be something working in her that scared the horses. He thought of Clara as like the clouds. Sometimes the small black clouds would pour out of the north; they seemed to roll over and over as they swept across the sky, like tumbleweeds. On some mornings things rolled inside Clara, and made her tense and snappish. She could do nothing with the horses on days like that. They became as she was, and Cholo would try gently to persuade her that it was not a good day to do the work. Other days, her spirit was quiet and calm and the horses felt that too. Those were the days they made progress training them.>>完整场景

Clara closed Bob’s eyes and sat with her memories for an hour. The girls were downstairs now, pestering Lorena and eating. Now and then she could hear their laughter.>>完整场景

The observation worried Jasper Fant so much that he lost his appetite and his ability to sleep. He lay awake in his blankets for three nights, clutching his gun—and when he couldn’t avoid night herding he felt such anxiety that he usually threw up whatever he ate. He would have quit the outfit, but that would only mean crossing hundreds of miles of bear-infested prairie alone, a prospect he couldn’t face. He decided if he ever got to a town where there was a railroad, he would take a train, no matter where it was going.Pea Eye, too, found the prospect of bears disturbing. “If we strike any more, let’s all shoot at once,” he suggested to the men repeatedly. “I guess if enough of us hit one it’d fall,” he always added. But no one seemed convinced, and no one bothered to reply.WHEN SALLY AND BETSEY asked her questions about her past, Lorena was perplexed. They were just girls—she couldn’t tell them the truth. They both idolized her and made much of her adventure in crossing the prairies. Betsey had a lively curiosity and could ask about a hundred questions an hour. Sally was more reserved and often chided her sister for prying into Lorena’s affairs.>>完整场景

“Go after him on what?” Augustus asked. “Have you gone daft, Soupy? You want to chase a grizzly bear on foot, after what you’ve seen? You wouldn’t even make one good bite for that bear.” The bear had crossed the stream and was ambling along lazily across the open plain.Despite Augustus’s cautions, as soon as the men could catch their horses, five of them, including Dish Boggett, Soupy, Bert, the Irishman and Needle Nelson, raced after the bear, still visible though a mile or more away. They began to fire long before they were in range, and the bear loped toward the mountains. An hour later the men returned, their horses run down, but with no bear trophies.>>完整场景

Clara and Augustus sat for an hour in the room where Bob lay. Augustus found it difficult to get used to the fact that the man’s eyes were open. Clara had ceased to care, or even notice.>>完整场景

“It will get dry,” Po Campo insisted. “We will be drinking horses’ blood if we’re not lucky.” “I think I must have drunk some last night,” Jasper said. “I never got sick enough to puke on my horse before.” Newt and the other boys raced to town, leaving Pea Eye far behind, but once they got there they felt somewhat at a loss as to what to do first. For an hour or two they merely walked up and down the one long street, looking at the people.>>完整场景

“I’ll check every few days, Ellie,” he said. “The doctor can send for me if you need me.” He paused. In the face of her silence, he didn’t know what to say. She sat propped up against the pillow, silent—it wasalmost as if she were dead. It reminded him of times in Arkansas, times in the loft when he felt as if he were with someone who wasn’t there. When he had found out she was alive and at the doctor’s in Ogallala, he had gone off behind Clara’s saddle shed and wept for an hour from relief. After all the worry and doubt, he had found her.>>完整场景

He swam the Arkansas River when he came to it, walked into town in wet clothes, bought another horse, and left again within the hour. The old horse trader was half drunk and eager to bargain, but July cut him short.>>完整场景

Clara tried several times during the day to get Elmira interested in the little boy, but with no success. Elmira allowed it to nurse, but that was not successful, either. The milk was so weak that the baby would only sleep an hour and then be hungry again. Her girls wanted to know why the baby cried so much. “He’s hungry,” Clara said.>>完整场景

“Ma’am, it’s got to nurse,” Clara said. Elmira made no objection when the baby was put to her breast, but the business was difficult. At first no milk would come—Clara began to fear the baby would weaken and die before it could even be fed. Finally it nursed a little but the milk didn’t satisfy it—an hour later it was crying in hunger again.>>完整场景

It seemed to her, after a month of it, that she was carrying Bob away with those sheets; he had already lost much weightand every morning seemed a little thinner to her. The large body that had lain beside her so many nights, that had warmed her in the icy nights, that had covered her those many times through the years and given her five children, was dribbling away as offal, and there was nothing she could do about it. The doctors in Ogallala said Bob’s skull was fractured; you couldn’t put a splint on a skull; probably he’d die. And yet he wasn’t dead. Often when she was cleaning him, bathing his soiled loins and thighs with warm water, the stem of life between his legs would raise itself, growing as if a fractured skull meant nothing to it. Clara cried at the sight—what it meant to her was that Bob still hoped for a boy. He couldn’t talk or turn himself, and he would never beat another horse, most likely, but he still wanted a boy. The stem let her know it, night after night, when all she came in to do was clean the stains from a dying body. She would roll Bob on his side and hold him there for a while, for his back and legs were developing terrible bedsores. She was afraid to turn him on his belly for fear he might suffocate, but she would hold him on his side for an hour, sometimes napping as she held him. Then she would roil him back and cover him and go back to her cot, often to lie awake half the night, looking at the prairies, sad beyond tears at the ways of things. There Bob lay, barely alive, his ribs showing more every morning, still wanting a boy. I could do it, she thought—would it save him if I did? I could go through it one more time—the pregnancy, the fear, the sore nipples, the worry—and maybe it would be a boy. Though she had borne five children, she sometimes felt barren, lying on her cot at night. She felt she was ignoring her husband’s last wish—that if she had any generosity she would do it for him. How could she lie night after night and ignore the strange, mute urgings of a dying man, one who had never been anything but kind to her, in his clumsy way. Bob, dying, still wanted her to make a little Bob. Sometimes in the long silent nights she felt she must be going crazy to think about such things, in such a way. And yet she came to dread having to go to him at night; it became as hard as anything she had had to do in her marriage. It was so hard that at times she wished Bob would go on and die, if he couldn’t get well. The truth was, she didn’t want another child, particularly not another boy. Somehow she felt confident she could keep her girls alive—but she lacked that confidence where boys were concerned. She remembered too well the days of icy terror and restless pain as she listened to Jim cough his way to death. She remembered her hatred of, and helplessness before, the fevers that had taken Jeff and Johnny. Not again, she thought—I won’t live that again, even for you, Bob. The memory of the fear that had torn her as her children approached death was the most vivid of her life: she could remember the coughings, the painful breathing. She never wanted to listen helplessly to such again.>>完整场景

“That wagon won’t be here for an hour,” Clara said. “Go see about your pa. His fever comes up in the afternoon. Wet a rag and wipe his face.” Both girls stood looking at her silently. They hated to go into the sickroom. Both of them had bright-blue eyes, their legacy from Bob, but their hair was like hers and they were built like her, even to the knobby knees. Bob had been kicked in the head by a mustang he was determined to break, against Clara’s advice. She had seen it happen—he had the mare snubbed to a post with a heavy rope and only turned his back on her for a second. But the mare struck with her front feet, quick as a snake. Bob had bent over to pick up another rope and the kick had caught him right back of the ear. The crack had sounded like a shot. The mare pawed him three or four times before Clara could reach him and drag him out of the way, but those blows had been minor. The kick behind the ear had almost killed him. They had been so sure he would die that they even dug the grave, up on the knoll east of the house where their three boys were buried: Jim and Jeff and Johnny, the three deaths Clara felt had turned her heart to stone: she hoped for stone, anyway, for stone wouldn’t suffer from such losses.>>完整场景

An hour later, Wilbarger was still breathing. Augustus stepped away for a minute, to relieve himself, and when he came back Wilbarger had rolled off the blanket and was dead. Augustus rolled him on his back and tied him in the blanket. Call was down by the river, smoking and waiting. He looked up when Augustus approached.>>完整场景

“You could take him with you when you hunt, like you used to,” she said. “He couldn’t pester me if he’s with you.” She had hardly spoken when a shot rang out. It passed between the two of them and hit the turkey, knocking it off its stick into the ashes. They both scrambled for the cover of the wagon and waited. An hour later they were still waiting.>>完整场景

“Hell, I’m the only one of your customers that’s taken a bath this year,” Jake complained. “You could take up with bankers and lawyers, and the sheets wouldn’t stink so.” “I like ’em muddy and bloody,” Sally said. “I ain’t nice, this ain’t a nice place, and it ain’t a nice life. I’d take a hog to bed if I could find one that walked on two legs.” Jake had seen hogs that kept cleaner than some of the men Sally Skull took upstairs, but something about her raw behavior stirred him, and he stayed with her and paid the daily ten dollars. The cowboys that came through were very poor cardplayers, so he could usually make his fee back in an hour. He tried other whores in other saloons, skinny ones and fat ones, but with them a time came when he would remember Lorena and immediately lose interest. Lorena was the most beautiful woman he had ever known, and her beauty grew in his memory. He thought of her often with a pang, but also with anger, for in his view it was entirely her own fault that she had been stolen. Whatever was happening to her, it was her punishment for stubbornness. She could easily have been living with him in a decent hotel in Austin or Fort Worth.>>完整场景

Lorena knew the cowboys were near, but she didn’t look out of the tent. Gus had assured her he would be back soon, and she trusted him—though sometimes when he was gone for an hour looking for game, she still got the shakes. Blue Duck wasn’t dead. He might come back and get her again, if Gus didn’t watch close. She remembered his face and the way he smiled when he kicked her. Gus was the only thing that kept the memories away, and sometimes they were so fresh and frightening that she wished she had died so her brain would stop working and just leave her in the quiet. But her brain wouldn’t stop—only Gus could distract it with talk and card games. Only his presence relaxed her enough that she could sleep.>>完整场景

“We’re about to eat,” he said. “It’s a free country, so my advice to you would be to make camp where you choose. I’ll borrow a pot from our cook and bring you some grub once you get settled.” “I’m much obliged,” Augustus said. “Noticed a tree in these parts?” “No, sir,” Wilbarger said. “If there was a tree in these parts I’d be sitting under it.” They made camp on the plain. Wilbarger was as good as his word. In an hour he returned with a small pack mule. Besides an ample pot of beefsteak and beans he brought a small tent.>>完整场景

Lorena said nothing. That night she woke up crying and shaking. Augustus held her and crooned to her as if she were a child. But she didn’t go back to sleep. She lay on the pallet, her eyes wide open. An hour or two before dawn the rain stopped, and soon a bright sun shone above the wet prairie.>>完整场景

“I guess this will spoil Jasper’s digestion,” he said, for Jasper’s sensitivity on the subject of rivers was becoming more pronounced. “We bogged sixty head of Mr. Pierce’s cattle in this very river, although that was over toward Arkansas. I must have had a hundred pounds of mud on my clothes before we got them out.” Deets put his horse into the surging water and was soon across the channel, but had to pick his way across another long expanse of sand before he was safely on the north bank. Evidently he didn’t like the crossing, because he waved the others back with his hat and loped away downriver. He was soon out of sight in the rain, but came back in an hour with news of a far better crossing downstream. By then the whole crew was nervous, for the Red was legendary for drowning cowboys, and the fact that they had nothing to do but sit and drip increased general anxiety.>>完整场景