词汇：often

adv. 常常，时常

相关场景

“He didn’t get my attention,” Lorena said. “He didn’t get anything.” “And Gus did the same and got everything,” Clara said. “Gus was lucky and Dish isn’t.” “I ain’t either,” Lorena said.Clara offered no advice. A few days later, when she was sewing, Lorena came and stood in front of her. She looked no better. “Why did you ask me to stay, when it was you Gus loved?” she asked. “Why didn’t you ask him to stay? If you had he’d be alive.” Clara shook her head. “He loved us both,” she said, “but Gus would never miss an adventure. Not for you or me or any other woman. No one could have kept him home. He was a rake and a rambler, though you’d have kept him longer than I could have.” Lorena didn’t believe it. She remembered how often Gus had talked of Clara. Of course it no longer mattered—nothing like that mattered anymore, and yet she couldn’t keep her mind from turning to it.>>完整场景

That night he wondered if he ought to leave. He could not stay around Clara without nursing hopes, and yet he could detect no sign that she cared about him. Sometimes he thought she did, but when he thought it over he always concluded that he had just been imagining things. Her remarks to him generally had a stinging quality, but he would often not realize he had been stung until after she left the scene. Working together in the lots, which they did whenever the weather was decent, she often lectured him on his behavior with the horses. She didn’t feel he paid close attention to them. July was at a loss to know how anyone could pay close attention to a horse when she was around, and yet the more his eyes turned to her the worse he did with the horses and the more disgusted she grew. His eyes would turn to her, though. She had taken to wearing her husband’s old coat and overshoes, both much too big for her. She wouldn’t wear gloves—she claimed the horses didn’t like it—and her large bony hands often got so cold she would have to stick them under the coat for a few minutes to warm them. She wore a variety of caps that she had ordered from somewhere—apparently she liked caps as much as she liked cake. None of them were particularly suited to a Nebraska winter. Her favorite one was an old Army cap Cholo had picked up on the plains somewhere. Sometimes Clara would tie a wool scarf over it to keep her ears warm, but usually the scarf came untied in the course of working with the horses, so that when they walked back up for a meal her hair was usually spilling over the collar of the big coat. Yet July couldn’t stop his eyes from feasting on her. He thought she was wonderfully beautiful, so beautiful that merely to walk with her from the lots to the house, when she was in a good mood, was enough to make him give up for another month all thought of leaving. He told himself that just being able to work with her was enough. And yet, it wasn’t—which is why the question finally forced itself out. He was miserable all night, for she hadn’t answered the question. But he had spoken the words and revealed what he wanted. He supposed she would think worse of him than she already did, once she thought it over.>>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

But in this case he lacked the interest. When it came time to summon the force, he hadn’t. He admired Dish Boggett, who indeed had held a true point for three thousand miles; he had also often proved himself the best man to break a stampede. But Call had let him go, and didn’t really care. He knew that he wouldn’t care if they all went, excepting Pea and the boy. He had no impulse to lead the men another step.>>完整场景

He could have ordered him to stay and put a little more of himself into the order, as he often had at times when men were unruly. Dish had been determined, but not determined enough to buck a forceful command. As Captain he had given such commands many times and never had one failed to be obeyed.>>完整场景

Old Hugh Auld came and went at will on his spotted pony. Though he talked constantly while he was with the crew, he often developed what he called lonesome feelings and disappeared for ten days at a time. Once in a prolonged warm spell he came racing in excitedly and informed Call that there was a herd of wild horses grazing only twenty miles to the south.>>完整场景

Dish Boggett felt angry. He hadn’t hired on to carpenter either. His first work for the Hat Creek outfit had been well- digging, and his last would be swinging an ax, it appeared. Neither was work fit for a cowhand, and he was on the verge of demanding his wages and standing up for his rights as a free man—but the Captain’s look dissuaded him, and the next morning, when they started the herd east along the Milk, he took the point for the last time. With Old Dog dead, the Texas bull was frequently in the forefront of the drive. He looked ugly, for his wound had been sewn up unevenly, and being one-eyed and one-horned had made him even more irascible. He would often turn and attack anyone who approached him on his blind side. Several men had narrowly escaped disaster, and only the fact that Captain Call favored the bull had kept them from shooting him.>>完整场景

He found a creek with a good stand of sheltering timber and decided it would do for a headquarters, but he felt no eagerness for the tasks ahead. Work, the one thing that had always belonged to him, no longer seemed to matter. He did it because there was nothing else to do, not because he felt the need. Some days he felt so little interest in the herd and the men that he could simply have ridden off and left them to make the best of things. The old sense of being responsible for their well-being had left him so completely that he often wondered how he could ever have felt it so strongly. The way they looked at him in the morning, as they waited for orders, irritated him more and more. Why should grown men wait for orders every day, after coming three thousand miles?>>完整场景

At dawn Clara went out and took Cholo some coffee. He had finished digging and was sitting on the mound of earth that would soon cover Bob. Walking toward the ridge in the early sunlight, Clara had the momentary sense that they were all watching her, the boys and Bob. The vision lasted a second; it was Cholo who was watching her. It was windy, and the grass waved over the graves of her three boys—four now, she felt. In memory Bob seemed like a boy to her also. He had aboyish innocence and kept it to the end, despite the strains of work and marriage in a rough place. It often irritated her, that innocence of his. She had felt it to be laziness—it left her alone to do the thinking, which she resented. Yet she had loved it, too. He had never been a knowing man in the way that Gus was knowing, or even Jake Spoon. When she decided to marry Bob, Jake, who was a hothead, grew red in the face and proceeded to throw a fit. It disturbed him terribly that she had chosen someone he thought was dumb. Gus had been better behaved, if no less puzzled. She remembered how it pleased her to thwart them—to make them realize that her measure was different from theirs. “I’ll always know where he is,” she told Gus. It was the only explanation she ever offered.>>完整场景

“Well, I guess it’s for the best,” he said. “The man wasn’t getting no better.” Lorena noticed that he sounded happier than she had heard him sound since she arrived at the ranch. She knew exactly what it meant. She had often seen him looking at Clara with helpless love in his eyes. She herself didn’t care one way or the other about July Johnson, but the dumb quality of his love annoyed her. Many men had looked at her that way, and she was not flattered by it. They wanted to pretend, such men, that they were different, that she was different, and that what might happen between them would be different than it would ever be. They wanted to pretend that they wanted pretty dresses and smiles, when what they really wanted was for her to lay down under them. That was the real wish beneath all the pretty wishes men had. And when she was under them, they could look down and pretend something pretty was happening, but she would look up and only see a dumb face above her, strained, dishonest and anything but pretty.>>完整场景

He was doing that when Lorena came to tell him Bob was dead. Hearing the footsteps, he had the hope that it was Clara, and he pictured her face in his mind, not stern and impersonal, as it often was when she was directing some work, but soft and smiling, as it might be if she were playing with Martin at the dinner table.>>完整场景

She had often been happy during it, but not because of anything Bob did. She had had more happiness from horses than from her husband, though he had been a decent husband, better than most women had, from what she could judge.>>完整场景

They were happy girls; they laughed often. It pleased Clara to hear them. She wondered if Bob could hear his two lively daughters laughing, as he lay dying. She wondered if it helped, if it made up in any way for her bad tempers and the deaths of the three boys. He had counted so on those boys—they would be his help, boys. Bob had never talked much, but the one thing he did talk about was how much they would get done once the boys got big enough to do their part of the work. Often, just hearing him describe the fences they would build, or the barns, or the cattle they would buy, Clara felt out of sorts—it made her feel very distant from Bob that he saw their boys mainly as hired hands that he wouldn’t have to pay. He sees them different, she thought. For her part, she just liked to have them there. She liked to look at them as they sat around the table, liked to watch them swimming and frolicking in the river, liked to sit by them sometimes when they slept, listening to them breathe. Yet they had died, and both she and Bob lost what they loved—Bob his dreams of future work with his sons, she the immediate pleasure of having sons to look at, to touch, to scold and tease and kiss.>>完整场景

“It is, too,” Betsey insisted. “If he’s got white hair he could die any time.” Lorena found that she didn’t think about Gus all that much. She was glad she had stayed at Clara’s. For almost the first time in her life she had a decent bed in a clean room and tasteful meals and people around who were kind to her. She liked having a whole room to herself, alone. Of course, she had had a room in Lonesome Dove, but it hadn’t been the same. Men could come into that room—letting them in was a condition of having it. But she didn’t have to let anyone into her room in Clara’s house, though often she-did let Betsey, who suffered from nightmares, into it. One night Betsey stumbled in, crying—Clara was out of the house, taking one of the strange walks she liked to take. Lorena was surprised and offered to go find Clara, but Betsey wasn’t listening. She came into the bed like a small animal and snuggled into Lorena’s arms. Lorena let her stay the night, and from then on, when Betsey had a nightmare, she came to Lorena’s room and Lorena soothed her.>>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

Newt had always been interested in snow, and looked at the mountains often, but in the weeks following Deets’s death he found it difficult to care much about anything, even snow. He didn’t pay much attention to the talk of storms, and didn’t really care if they all froze, herd and hands together.>>完整场景

The other hands were somber. Soupy Jones and Bert Borum, who didn’t feel it appropriate for white men to talk much to niggers, exchanged the view that nevertheless this one had been uncommonly decent. Needle Nelson offered to help dig the grave, for Deets had been the man who finally turned the Texas bull the day the bull got after him. Dish Boggett hadn’t said much to Deets, either, but he had often been cheered, from his position on the point, to see Deets come riding back through the heat waves. It meant he was on course, and that water was somewhere near. Dish wished he had said more to the man at some point.>>完整场景

By midafternoon Call came back from his walk and decided they would go ahead. It was go ahead or go back, and he didn’t mean to go back. It wasn’t rational to think of driving cattle over eighty waterless miles, but he had learned in his years of tracking Indians that things which seemed impossible often weren’t. They only became so if one thought about them too much so that fear took over. The thing to do was go. Some of the cattle might not make it, but then, he had never expected to reach Montana with every head.>>完整场景

“That’s six he’s had since we started playing,” he said. “That sucker’s got more stamina than me.” “More opportunity, too,” Allen O’Brien observed. He had adjusted quite well to the cowboy life, but he still could not forget Ireland. When he thought of his little wife he would break into tears of homesickness, and the songs he sung to the cattle would often remind him of her.>>完整场景

“What are we waiting on?” Lippy asked. “We’re three miles behind already.” Po Campo stood by the water’s edge, looking across the Platte to the south. He was thinking of his dead sons, killed by Blue Duck on the Canadian. He didn’t think often of his sons, but when he did, a feeling of sadness filled him, a feeling so heavy that it was an effort for him to move. Thinking of them in their graves in New Mexico made him feel disloyal, made him feel that he should have shot himself and been buried with them, for was it not the duty of a parent to stay with the children? But he had left, first to go south and kill his faithless wife, and now to the north, while Blue Duck, the killer, still rode free on the llano—unless someone had killed him, which Po Campo doubted. Lippy’s fears about Indians did not move him—the sight of flowing water moved him, stirring feelings in him which, though sad, were deep feelings. They made him want to sing his saddest songs.>>完整场景

Though he had been constantly jealous while she was traveling with Gus, at least she was there. In the evening he would often see her sitting outside the tent. He dreamed about her often—once had even dreamed that she was sleeping near him. In the dream she was so beautiful that he ached when he woke up. That Gus had seen fit to leave her on the Platte made him terribly irritable.>>完整场景

“Talk ain’t everything,” she said—words she had often remembered with rue during years when Bob scarcely seemed to utter two words a month.>>完整场景

It had been one-sided adoration, though, for Gus considered Bob one of the dullest men alive, and often said so. “Why are you marrying that dullard?” he asked her often.>>完整场景

“You ain’t women yet,” Clara said. “I’m the only one around here, and he better spruce up if he wants to keep on my good side.” July soon returned to work, but his demeanor had not greatly improved. He had little humor in him and could not be teased successfully, which was an irritant to Clara. She had always loved to tease and considered it an irony of her life that she was often drawn to men who didn’t recognize teasing even when she was inflicting it on them. Bob had never responded to teasing, or even noticed it, and her powers in that line had slowly rusted from lack of practice. Of course she teased the girls, but it was not the same as having a grown man to work on—she had often felt like pinching Bob for being so stolid. July was no better—in fact, he and Bob were cut from the same mold, a strong but unimaginative mold.>>完整场景

“She ought to have loved him,” Sally said.“Ought don’t count for as much as a gnat, when you’re talking about love,” Clara said. “She didn’t. You seen her. She didn’t even care for Martin. We’ve already given July and Martin more love than that poor woman ever gave them. I don’t say that to condemn her. I know she had her troubles, and I doubt she was often in her right mind. I’m sorry she had no more control of herself to run off from her husband and child and get killed.” She stopped, to let the girls work on the various questions a little. It interested her which they would pick as the main point.>>完整场景