词汇：reason

n. 理由；理性；动机

相关场景

The first thing July did was buy a decent horse. He went to the post office, for he felt he owed Fort Smith an explanation as to why he had not come back. For some reason he felt a surge of optimism as he walked down the street to the post office. Now that he had survived the plains it seemed possible that he could find Ellie after all. He had lost all interest in catching Jake Spoon; he just wanted to find his wife and go home. If Peach didn’t like it—and she wouldn’t—she would just have to lump it. If Ellie wasn’t in Dodge she would probably be in Abilene. He would soon catch up with her.>>完整场景

And yet, now Call and Gus were respectable cattlemen, looked up to everywhere they went, and he was riding with a gang of hardened outlaws who didn’t care who they killed. Somehow he had slipped out of the respectable life. He had never been a churchgoer, but until recently he had had no reason to fear the law.>>完整场景

For some reason Gus was still watching the cloud, which seemed to her no worse-looking than many another cloud. But he was studying it intently.>>完整场景

“How many more times I’m likely to marry,” Augustus said. “That’s the only interesting question, ain’t it? Which river I drown in don’t matter to me. That’s Jasper’s interest. I’d just like to know my matrimonial prospects.” “Spit,” Po said. “Spit in the wagon here.” Augustus walked over to the wagon and spat on the boards. The day before, Po Campo had caught six prairie-chicken hatchlings, for some reason, and they were running around in the wagon bed, chirping. Po came over and looked for a moment at Augustus’s expectoration.>>完整场景

Luke was not easy to discourage. Soon he took a new tack, which was to persuade Zwey that when they hunted the two of them ought to hunt in separate directions. It was true that game was scarce, but that wasn’t the reason Luke hunted by himself. All he was hunting was Elmira. As soon as he knew that Zwey was two or three miles from the wagon, he circled back and pressed his suit. He was direct about it, too. He would tie his horse to the wagon and climb right in with her. He put his arm around her and made crude suggestions.>>完整场景

“Because it was as close as you ever came to doing something normal,” Augustus said. “It’s all I’ve got to work with. Here you’ve brought these cattle all this way, with all this inconvenience to me and everybody else, and you don’t have no reason in this world to be doing it.” Call didn’t answer. He sat smoking. The Irishman had begun to sing to the herd.>>完整场景

“We might not last long if we did,” Augustus said. “Every mangy renegade that’s left loose knows about this place. If a bunch of them showed up at once we’d be in trouble.” Lorena understood that, but she didn’t want to go. Lying on the pallet and playing cards for buttons was fine, so long as it was just Gus who was there. She didn’t want to see other men, for any reason at all. She didn’t want them to see her.>>完整场景

He had a little dream about the wild pigs, not too frightening. The pigs were not as wild as they had been in real life. They were just rooting around a cabin and not trying to harm him, yet he woke in a terrible fright and saw something incomprehensible. Janey was standing a few feet in front of him, with a big rock raised over her head. She was holding itwith both hands—why would she do such a thing at that time of night? She wasn’t making a sound; she just stood in front of him holding the rock. It was not until she flung it that he realized someone else was there. But someone was: someone big. In his surprise, Roscoe forgot he had a pistol. He quickly stood up. He didn’t see where the rock went, but Janey suddenly dropped to her knees. She looked around at him. “Shoot at him,” she said. Roscoe remembered the pistol, which was cocked, but before he could raise it, the big shadow that Janey had thrown the rock at slid close to him and shoved him—not a hard shove, but it made him drop the pistol. He knew he was awake and not dreaming, but he didn’t have any more strength than he would have had in a dream in terms of moving quick. He saw the big shadow standing by him but he had felt no fear, and the shadow didn’t shove him again. Roscoe felt warm and sleepy and sat back down. It was like he was in a warm bath. He hadn’t had too many warm baths in his life, but he felt like he was in one and was ready for a long snooze. Janey was crawling, though—crawling right over his legs. “Now what are you doing?” he said, before he saw that her eyes were fixed on the pistol he had dropped. She wanted the pistol, and for some reason crawled right over his legs to get to it. But before she got to it the shadow came back. “Why, you’re a fighter, ain’t you?” the shadow man said. “If I wasn’t in such a hurry I’d show you a trick or two.” Then he raised his arms and struck down at her; Roscoe couldn’t see if it was with an ax or what, but the sound was like an ax striking wood, and Janey stopped moving and lay across his legs. “Joe?” Roscoe said; he had just remembered that he had made Joe stop cocking and uncocking his rifle so he could get to sleep.>>完整场景

His name was Aus Frank, and he had started as a mountain man, trapping beaver. He had once kept a store in Waco but, for some reason got mad and robbed the bank next to his store—the bank had thought they were getting along with him fine until the day he walked in and robbed them. Augustus and Call were in Waco at the time, and though Call was reluctant to bother with bank robbers—he felt bankers were so stupid they deserved robbing—they were persuaded to go after him. They caught him right away, but not without a gun battle. The battle took place in a thicket on the Brazos, where Aus Frank had stopped to cook some venison. It went on for two hours and resulted in no injuries; then Aus Frank ran out of ammunition and had been easy enough to arrest. He cursed them all the way back to Waco and broke out of jail the day they left town. Augustus had not heard of him since—yet there he was wheeling a barrow full of buffalo bones across the high plains.>>完整场景

Luke was a weaselly little buffalo hunter with only a thumb and one finger on his left hand. He carried dice and gambled when he could get anyone to gamble with him. Once on the boat she had asked Fowler about him, and Fowler said a butcher had cut his fingers off with a cleaver, for some reason.>>完整场景

Now that the danger was past, Roscoe began to feel that there were many awkward matters awaiting explanation. He had forgotten about Elmira and her departure for several days, although her departure was the reason he was in Texas.>>完整场景

Hutto didn’t fight but neither did he get handcuffed, for the simple reason that his wrists were too big. July was forced to tie him with a saddle string, a method he would rather have avoided. A man as large as Hutto would eventually stretch out any rope or piece of rawhide if he kept trying.>>完整场景

“You might shoot me, but you ain’t putting no dern cuffs on me,” Hutto said when July approached him.“This is July Johnson, and I wouldn’t fight him,” Roscoe said. For some reason he felt rather friendly to Hutto, though it was Hutto who had been most inclined to kill him.>>完整场景

“I guess it’s a free country,” the cowboy said. “Anyway, I ain’t cussing.” “I hope you can afford a stamp,” the old man said. “We don’t give credit around here.” July didn’t wait to hear the end of the argument. He could tell by the handwriting on the envelope that the letter was from Peach, not Elmira. The realization knocked his spirits down several pegs. He knew he had no reason to expect a letter from Elmira in the first place, but he was longing to see her, and the thought that she might have written had been comforting.>>完整场景

But she wasn’t, though her hands were raw from gripping the horsehair so tightly. Minute by minute, for hours, it seemed to her that she couldn’t go on—that she might as well give up and slide under the animal’s belly. There was no reason to stay alive anyway: Blue Duck had her.>>完整场景

Lorena was too tired for his threat to scare her much. She wasn’t going to run away and give him a reason to cut a hole in her stomach. She did think she was going to die, though. She felt death had her, in the form of the Comanchero. She wouldn’t live to be cut or be gnawed by coyotes. She would die if he touched her, she felt. She was too tired to care much. The one thing that crossed her mind was that she should have gone with Xavier. He was a man of his word, and no worse in most respects than other men. And yet she had been determined to go riding off with Jake, who had not even looked after her three weeks. Jake was probably still in Austin, playing cards. She didn’t particularly blame him—playing cards beat most things you could do.>>完整场景

“Yep,” Augustus said, saddling the sorrel. “I didn’t worry much because Deets tracked him way south. But I guess he fooled us both.” “Why, there was talk of him over at Fort Worth,” Jake said. “He runs a big gang of murderers. They lay by the trails and murder travelers for whatever they’ve got on ’em. Why didn’t you just bring her to camp, if you knew he was around?” “I should have, for sure,” Augustus said. “But she didn’t want to come. She had faith in you for some reason.” “Well, this is aggravating,” Jake said. “She wouldn’t come to town either. She would have been safe in town. But she wouldn’t come.” “What’s your plan, Gus?” he asked, when he saw that Augustus was almost ready to leave.>>完整场景

Newt finally got his breath back and stopped crying, but he didn’t get up because there was no reason to. He felt a terrible anger at Mouse for having run off and put him in such a position. If Mouse had suddenly walked up, Newt felt he would cheerfully have shot him.>>完整场景

He slowed Mouse to a walk in hope of thinking up something to say before he had to speak, but for some reason his mind wouldn’t work. He also found that he couldn’t breathe easily.>>完整场景

When the boy was born it got worse. For the first two years he was in torment over what to do. Gus claimed Maggie had said the boy was Call’s, but how could she know for sure? Maggie hadn’t had it in her to refuse a man. It was the only reason she was a whore, Call had decided—she just couldn’t turn away any kind of love. He felt it must all count as love, in her thinking—the cowboys and the gamblers. Maybe she just thought it was the best love she could get.>>完整场景

Call got his rifle, out of the scabbard and cleaned it, though it was in perfect order. Sometimes the mere act of cleaning a gun, an act he had performed thousands of times, would empty his mind of jarring thoughts and memories—but this time it didn’t work. Gus had jarred him with mention of Maggie, the bitterest memory of his life. She had died in Lonesome Dove some twelve years before, but the memory had lost none of its salt and sting, for what had happened with her had been unnecessary and was now uncorrectable. He had made mistakes in battle and led men to their deaths, but his mind didn’t linger on those mistakes; at least the battles had been necessary, and the men soldiers. He could feel that he hadBut Maggie had not been a fighting man—just a needful young whore, who had for some reason fixed on him as the man who could save her from her own mistakes. Gus had known her first, and Jake, and many other men, whereas he had only visited her out of curiosity to find out what it was that he had heard men talk and scheme about for so long. It turned out not to be much, in his view—a brief, awkward experience, where the pleasure was soon drowned in embarrassment and a feeling of sadness. He ought not to have gone back twice, let alone a third time, yet something drew him back—not so much the need of his own flesh as the helplessness and need of the woman. She had such frightened eyes. He never met her in the saloon but came up the back stairs, usually after dark; she would be standing just inside the door waiting, her face anxious. Some weakness in him brought him back every few nights, for two months or more. He had never said much to her, but she said a lot to him. She had a small, quick voice, almost like a child’s. She would talk constantly, as if to cover his embarrassment at what they had met to do. Some nights he would sit for half an hour, for he came to like her talk, though he had long since forgotten what she had said. But when she talked, her face would relax for a while, her eyes lose their fright. She would clasp his hand while she talked—one night she buttoned his shirt. And when he was ready to leave—always a need to leave, to be away, would come over him—she would look at him with fright in her face again, as if she had one more thing to say but couldn’t say it.>>完整场景

Then, for no reason, between one stride and the next, the Hell Bitch suddenly rolled out of her easy gait into a flying buck.>>完整场景

But a runaway girl was not the sort of guide he had in mind. After all, the only reason he was looking for July was to report on a runaway woman. How would it look if he showed up with another? July would think it highly irregular, and if the folks back in Fort Smith got wind of it it could easily be made to look bad. After all, old Sam hadn’t kept her around just because she could fry a possum in the dark.>>完整场景

“Why wouldn’t they?” Call asked. “We ain’t been around.” “That ain’t the reason—the reason is we didn’t die,” Augustus said. “Now Travis lost his fight, and he’ll get in the history books when someone writes up this place. If a thousand Comanches had cornered us in some gully and wiped us out, like the Sioux just done Custer, they’d write songs about us for a hundred years.” It struck Call as a foolish remark. “I doubt there was ever a thousand Comanches in one bunch,” he said. “If there had been they would have taken Washington, D.C.” But the more Augustus thought about the insults they had been offered in the bar—a bar where once they had been hailed as heroes—the more it bothered him.>>完整场景

Then one of them shot off a gun for no reason. Then they pistol-whipped the bartender. I offered them a chance to leave, but since they haven’t, I’m a notion to file charges and let the law take its course.” He said his little say so pompously that it struck the three of them as funny. Augustus laughed out loud, Call and Tobe smiled, and even Ned Tym chimed in with a chuckle.>>完整场景