词汇：certain

adj. 某一；确信；无疑的；有把握的；必然的

字根:ten=tin;tain;hold;keep(握住;维持)

相关场景

“Is it just the two of you?” he asked, buttoning his pants. He had built up a certain curiosity about Mary, and despite all his embarrassments decided he might try to visit her if he ever got another ten.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
But a few years passed, and Clara went back to the stories in the magazines. She loved to read aloud, and she read snatches of them to her daughters as soon as they were big enough to listen. Bob didn’t particularly like it, but he tolerated it. No other woman he knew read as much as his wife, and he thought it might be the cause of certain of her
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Bob, though, hadn’t died—neither had he recovered. His eyes were open, but he could neither speak nor move. He could swallow soup, if his head was tilted a certain way, and it was chicken broth that had kept him alive the three months since his accident. He simply lay staring up with his large blue eyes, feverish sometimes but mostly as still as if he were dead.
不过，鲍勃没有死，也没有康复。他的眼睛是睁开的，但他既不能说话也不能动。如果他的头朝某个方向倾斜，他就能喝汤，而正是鸡汤让他在事故发生后的三个月里活了下来。他只是躺在那里，睁着大大的蓝眼睛，有时会发烧，但大部分时间都像死了一样一动不动。
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Spoon, how’d you like to be a regulator?” he asked a little later. “I recall from stories I’ve heard that you can shoot a gun.” “What is a regulator?” Jake asked. “I’ve not heard the term.” “Folks up in Kansas are getting tired of these Texas cattle tramping in constantly,” Dan said. “They want this trail-driving business regulated.” “Regulated how?” “Well, taxed,” Dan said. “People can’t go on driving cattle just anywhere. If they want to cross certain rivers at certain crossings, they’ve got to pay for the privilege. If they won’t pay in cash, then they’ve got to pay in cattle.” “Is it the law in Kansas, or what?” Jake asked.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
there:
Call’s abrupt decision to become a cattleman and his own decision, equally abrupt, to try and rescue a girl foolish enough to be taken in by Jake Spoon. None of it was sensible, yet he had to admit there was something about such follies that he liked. The sensible way, which he had pursued once or twice in his life, had always proved boring, usually within a few days. In his case it had led to nothing much, just excessive drunkenness and reckless card playing. There was more enterprise in certain follies, it seemed to him.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
He got up and trudged through the faint light back toward the wagon, and had not walked a quarter of a mile before he heard a loping horse and turned to see Pea clipping along a ridge, right toward him. Though caught afoot, Newt still felt a certain relief. Pea was his friend, and wouldn’t judge him as harshly as the others would.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Although she knew he would come back in time, she was less and less certain that it mattered, for Jake had taken a grudge against her and she suspected he would be slow to give it up. It was puzzling to her, thinking back on it, why she had been so quick to trust him. Somehow he had convinced her he was the answer to all her problems. She had felt an overpowering feeling of need and trust when he had sat down and began talking to her so friendly. He had seemed as eager to hear her talk as she had been to hear his.
>> 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
The woman seemed to derive a certain amusement from the way he hobbled around trying to gain control of his limbs.
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Looking at Dish, so tight with his need for Lorena, whom he would probably never have, Augustus remembered his own love for Clara Allen—it had pained him and pleased him at once. As a young woman Clara had such grace that just looking at her could choke a man; then, she was always laughing, though her life had not been the easiest. Despite her cheerful eyes, Clara was prone to sudden angers, and sadnesses so deep that nothing he could say or do would prompt her to answer him, or even to look at him. When she left to marry her horse trader, he felt that he had missed the great opportunity of his life; for all their fun together he had not quite been able to touch her, either in her happiness or her sadness. It wasn’t because of his wife, either—it was because Clara had chosen the angle of their relation. She loved him in certain ways, wanted him for certain purposes, and all his straining, his tricks, his looks and his experience could not induce her to alter the angle.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
She seldom did eat with them. It bothered July a good deal, though he made no complaint. Since their little table was almost under the loft he could look up and see Elmira’s bare legs as he ate. It didn’t seem normal to him. His mother had died when he was six, yet he could remember that she always ate with the family; she would never have sat with her legs dangling practically over her husband’s head. He had been at supper at many cabins in his life, but in none of them had the wife sat in the loft while the meal was eaten. It was a thing out of the ordinary, and July didn’t like for things to be out of the ordinary in his life. It seemed to him it was better to do as other people did—if society at large did things a certain way it had to be for a good reason, and he looked upon common practices as rules that should be obeyed. After all, his job was to see that common practices were honored—that citizens weren’t shot, or banks robbed.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
July was prepared to accept a certain rowdiness on the part of the cowboys as they passed through, but he felt no leniency at all for men like Jake Spoon. Gamblers offended him, and he had warned several out of town.
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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
“Hell, I don’t need all this,” he said. “There ain’t a horse in town worth fifty dollars, unless it’s that mare of Call’s, and she ain’t for sale.” But he took the money, thinking it a fine joke on Gus that the money from his poke would buy Lorie a mount to ride to Montana, or however far they went. He had known perfectly well Gus would try something of the sort, for Gus would never let him have a woman to himself. Gus liked to be a rival more than anything else, Jake figured. And as for Lorie going through with it—well, it relieved him of a certain level of responsibility for her. If she was going to keep that much independence, so would he.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“It ain’t our herd,” she said. “We don’t have to wait for it.” There was something different about her, Jake had to admit. She had a beautiful face, a beautiful body, but also a distance in her such as he had never met in a woman. Certain mountains were that way, like the Bighorns. The air around them was so clear you could ride toward them for days without seeming to get any closer. And yet, if you kept riding, you would get to the mountains. He was not so sure he would ever get to Lorie. Even when she took him, there was a distance between them. And yet she would not let him leave.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Lorena watched Jake closely for a few minutes to see if she was the cause of his sulk. After all, she had sold Gus the poke that very afternoon—it was not impossible that Jake had found out, some way. She was not one who expected to get away with much in life. If you did a thing hoping a certain person wouldn’t find out, that person always did. When Gus tricked her and she gave him the poke, she was confident the matter would get back to Jake eventually. Lippy was only human, and things that happened to her got told and repeated. She didn’t exactly want Jake to know, but she wasn’t afraid of him, either. He might hit her, or he might shoot Gus: she found she couldn’t easily predict him, which was one reason she didn’t care if he found out. After that, she would know him a lot better, whatever he did.
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The widow Spettle had a brood of eight children, Bill and Pete being the oldest. Ned Spettle, the father of them all, had died of drink two years before. It looked to Call as if the family was about to starve out. They had a little creek-bottom farm not far north of Pickles Gap, but the soil was poor and the family had little to eat but sowbelly and beans. The widow Spettle, however, was eager for him to take the boys, and would hear no protest from Call. She was a thin woman with bitter eyes. Call had heard from someone that she had been raised rich, in the East, with servants to comb her hair and help her into her shoes when she got up. It might just have been a story—it was hard for him to imagine a grownup who would need to be helped into their own shoes—but if even part of it was true she had come a long way down. Ned Spettle had never got around to putting a floor in the shack of a house he built. His wife was rearing eight children on the bare dirt. He had heard it said that Ned had never got over the war, which might have explained it. Plenty hadn’t. It accounted for the shortage of grown men of a certain age, that war. Call himself felt a kind of guilt at having missed it, though the work he and Gus had done on the border had been just as dangerous, and just as necessary.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
The realization was unhelpful, though, because the horses behind him had caught up with him and all were struggling for running room. For a second he thought of trying to force his way to the outside, but then he saw two riders already there, struggling to turn the herd. They were not succeeding, but they were not his riders, either, and it struck him that being in the middle of the herd offered a certain safety, at least.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“All right,” he said, quickly sorting over in his head who should be assigned to do what. “These are mainly Wilbarger’s horses. The reason they’re so gentle is because they’ve been run to a frazzle, and they’re used to Texans besides.” “I’d catch one and ride him home, if I could find one that paces,” Jake said. “I’m about give out from bouncing on this old trotter you boys gave me.” “Jake’s used to feather pillows and Arkansas whores,” Augustus said. “It’s a pity he has to associate with hard old cobs like us.” “You two can jabber tomorrow,” Call said. “Pedro’s horses have got to be somewhere. I’d like to make a run at them before I quit. That means we have to split three ways.” “Leave me split the shortest way home,” Jake said, never too proud to complain. “I’ve bounced my ass over enough of Mexico.” “All right,” Call said. “You and Deets and Dish take these horses home.” He would have liked to have Deets with him, but Deets was the only one he knew for certain could take the Wilbarger horses on a line for Lonesome Dove. Dish Boggett, though said to be a good hand, was an untested quality, whereas Jake was probably lost himself.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
No sooner had it occurred to him that there might be more bandits than he began to wish it hadn’t occurred to him. The thought was downright scary. There were lots of low bushes, mostly chaparral, between him and the hut, and there could be a bandit with a Bowie knife behind any one of them. Pea had often explained to him how effective a good bowie knife was in the hands of someone who knew where to stick it—descriptions of stickings came back to his mind as he eased forward. Before he had gone ten steps he had become almost certain that his end was at hand. It was clear to him that he would be an easy victim for a bandit with the least experience. He had never shot anyone, and he couldn’t see well at night. His own helplessness was so obvious to him that he quickly came to feel numb—not too numb to dread what might happen, but too dull-feeling to be able to think of a plan of resistance.
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More galling still was the fact that no member of his own firm had noticed the motto, not even Newt, from whom Augustus expected a certain alertness. Of course two members of the firm were totally illiterate—three, if he chose to count Bolivar—and wouldn’t have known Latin from Chinese. Still, the way they casually treated the sign as just part of the landscape caused Augustus to brood a good deal about the contempt that familiarity breeds.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
They squatted in the shade of the springhouse for a bit, their backs against the adobe, which was still cool on the side the sun hadn’t struck. Augustus saw no need to mention Lorena, since he knew Jake would soon discover her for himself and probably have her in love with him within the week. The thought of Dish Boggett’s bad timing made him smile, for it was certain Jake’s return would doom whatever chance Dish might have had. Dish had committed himself to a day of well- digging for nothing, for when it came to getting women in love with him Jake Spoon had no equal. His big eyes convinced them he’d be lost without them, and none of them seemed to want him just to go on and be lost.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Augustus stood up. “Let’s go for a stroll,” he said. “This man don’t like folks idling in his kitchen after a certain hour.” They walked out into the hot morning. The sky was already white. Bolivar followed them out, picking up a rawhide lariat that he kept on a pile of firewood back by the porch. They watched him walk off into the chaparral, the rope in his hand.
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“Good evening, my good friend,” Augustus said. He said it with as much gravity as he could muster, since Xavier appreciated a certain formality.
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“You should have let him sit,” Augustus said, a little later. “After all, the boy’s only chance for an education is listening to me talk.” Call let that one float off. Augustus had spent a year in a college, back in Virginia somewhere, and claimed to have learned his Greek letters, plus a certain amount of Latin. He never let anyone forget it.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇