词汇：nearly

adv. 差不多，几乎；密切地

相关场景

IT SEEMED TO JULY that he was nearly as cursed as Job when it came to catching Elmira. Despite his caution, he kept having accidents and setbacks of a kind that had never happened at home in Fort Smith. Three days out of Dodge, the new horse he had bought, which turned out not to be well-broken, fell and crippled himself trying to throw a hobble. July waited a day, hoping it wasn’t as bad as he thought it was—but the next day he saw it was even worse. It hardly seemed possible to lose two horses on one trip, when he had never lost a horse before in his life, but it was a fact he had to face.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Yes,” Clara said. “It’s nearly twenty miles to town. Won’t you get down and rest?” “Do you know Dee Boot?” the woman said. “I’m looking for him.” “Si—pistolero,” Cholo said quietly. He did most of their shopping and knew practically everyone in Ogallala.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Clara had bought the piano with money saved all those years from the sale of her parents’ little business in Texas. She had never let Bob use the money—another bone of contention between them. She wanted it for her children, so when the time came they could be sent away to school and not have to spend their whole youth in such a raw, lonely place. The first of the money she spent was on the two-story frame house they had built three years before, after nearly fifteen years of life in the sod house Bob had dug for her on a slope above the Platte. Clara had always hated the sod house—hated the dirt that seeped down on her bedclothes, year after year. It was dust that caused her firstborn, Jim, to cough virtually from his birth until he died a year later. In the mornings Clara would walk down and wash her hair in the icy waters of the Platte, and yet by supper time, if she happened to scratch her head, her fingernails would fill with dirt that had seeped down during the day. For some reason, no matter where she moved her bed, the roof would trickle dirt right onto it. She tacked muslin, and finally canvas, on the ceiling over the bed but nothing stopped the dirt for long. It sifted through. It seemed to her that all her children had been conceived in dust clouds, dust rising from the bedclothes or sifting down from the ceiling. Centipedes and other bugs loved the roof; day after day they crawled down the walls, to end up in her stewpots or her skillets or the trunks where she stored her clothes.
克拉拉用多年来卖掉父母在得克萨斯州的小生意攒下的钱买了这架钢琴。她从未让鲍勃使用这笔钱——这是他们之间的另一个争论点。她想把它送给她的孩子，这样到时候他们就可以被送去上学，而不必在这样一个原始、孤独的地方度过整个青春。她花的第一笔钱是他们三年前建造的两层框架房子，在鲍勃在普拉特河上方的一个斜坡上为她挖的草皮房子里生活了近十五年。克拉拉一直讨厌那间草皮屋，讨厌年复一年地渗到她床上用品上的污垢。正是灰尘导致她的长子吉姆从出生到一年后去世几乎一直咳嗽。每天早上，克拉拉都会走下来，在普拉特冰冷的水中洗头，但到了晚饭时间，如果她碰巧挠头，她的指甲里就会充满白天渗出的污垢。不知为什么，无论她把床移到哪里，屋顶上的污垢都会直接流到上面。她在床的天花板上钉上了细棉布，最后是帆布，但没有什么能长时间阻挡污垢。它通过筛选。在她看来，她所有的孩子都是在尘埃云中孕育的，尘埃云是从床上用品上升起的，还是从天花板上筛下的。蜈蚣和其他虫子喜欢屋顶；日复一日，它们沿着墙壁爬行，最终落入她的炖锅、煎锅或她存放衣服的箱子里。
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“I wish he’d had the sense to stay with Lorie,” Augustus said. “She might have aggravated him some, but she wouldn’t have led him to this.” “It’s his dern laziness,” Call said. “Jake just kind of drifts. Any wind can blow him.” He touched the mare and rode on—he didn’t need Deets in order to follow the tracks of nearly thirty horses. He put the mare into a slow lope, a gait she could hold all day if necessary.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
He rode up and caught the horse easily—but then, what looked to be a simple cattle crossing turned out to be anything but simple. Dish Boggett’s horse, which had crossed many rivers calmly and easily, took fright in midstream and very nearly drowned Dish. The horse went crazy in the water, and if Dish hadn’t been a strong swimmer, would have pawed him under. Even then it might have happened if Deets had not dashed back into the water and fought the horse off long enough for Dish to get ashore.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“We nearly rode into them,” he said. “They’re close.” Dan Suggs had been smoking, but he quickly put his smoke out and dismounted.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
ONCE THEY GOT WEST, beyond the line of the grasshopper plague, the herd found good grass, the skies stayed clear for nearly two weeks, and the drive went the smoothest it had gone. The cattle settled down and moved north toward the Arkansas without stampedes or other incidents, except for one—a freak accident that cost Newt his favorite horse, Mouse.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“I guess we ought to rope him and drag him to the graveyard,” one said. “He looks dead to me.” “Hell, I wish all I had to do was lay on them stairs and vomit,” the other cowboy said. “It beats loading them longhorns.” July lay face down for a long time. The heaves finally diminished, but from time to time he raised his head and spat over the edge, to clear his throat. It was nearly sundown before he felt like sitting up, and then it was only to sit with his back against the building. He was high enough that he could see over the main street and the cattle pens and west to where the sun was setting, far off on the plain. It was setting behind a large herd of cattle being held a mile or two from town.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
The fanner was plowing a shallow furrow through the tough prairie grass. Seeing the riders approach, he stopped. He was a middle-aged man with a curly black beard, thoroughly sweated from his work. His wife and son watched the Suggsesapproach. Their wheelbarrow was nearly full of buffalo chips.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“I remember that time we tried to drive cattle,” Roy said. “The Indians run off half of them, and we all nearly drowned in them rivers. Why try it agin?” “You ain’t heard the plan, so shut up,” Dan said, with a touch of anger. “What we done wrong the first time was doing it honest. I’m through with honest. It’s every man for himself in this country, and that’s the way I like it. There ain’t much law and mostly it can be outrun.” “Whose herd would you steal?” Jake asked.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
One even lifted his pistol out of its holster, and Newt’s heart nearly stopped. He expected to be shot with his own gun and felt foolish for allowing it to be taken so easily. But the Indians merely passed it around for comment and then stuck it back in the holster. Newt smiled at them, relieved. If they would give him his gun back, they couldn’t mean to harm him.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“He just keeps wanting to marry you,” Zwey said. “Looks like he’d quit it.” Luke did quit, at that point. He lay in the wagon for four days, trying to get his breath through his broken nose. One of his ears had been nearly scraped off on the wheel; his lips were smashed and several of his teeth broken. His face swelled tosuch a point that they couldn’t tell at first if his jaw was broken, but it turned out it wasn’t. The first day, he could barely mumble, but he did persuade Elmira to try and sew his ear back on. Zwey was for cutting it off, since it just hung by a bit of skin, but Elmira took pity on Luke and sewed on the ear. She made a bad job of it, mainly because Luke yelped and jerked every time she touched him with the needle. When she finished, the ear wasn’t quite in its right place; it set a little lower than the other and she had pulled the threads a little too tight, so that it didn’t have quite the right shape. But at least it was on his head.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“With the gun?” he asked. “Why?” “He tried to interfere with me,” Elmira said. “He tries it nearly ever day, once you go off.” Zwey pondered that information for a time. They had made a mess of cooking the turkey, but at least it was something to eat. Zwey gnawed on a big drumstick while he pondered.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Monkey John looked awful. He had a bloody lump on his head, and a hangover. He had slept with his face in the dirt all night and an ant had stung him several times, leaving one eye swollen nearly shut. He got to his feet but he could hardly stand.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
He remembered when he had first come to the high plains, years before. For two days he and Call and the Rangers had ridden parallel to the great southern buffalo herd—hundreds of thousands of animals, slowly grazing north. It had been difficult to sleep at night because the horses were nervous around so many animals, and the sounds of the herd were constant. They had ridden for nearly a hundred miles and seldom been out of sight of buffalo.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
All the while Roscoe slumped over his horse’s neck, snoring away. They were nearly on the outskirts of Fort Worth before he woke up, and it was not until July handed the prisoners over to the sheriff that he began to feel alive.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Well, go get some grub,” Call said to Deets. “I’m going over to them bluffs. He might have a gang or he might not. You get between our camp and Jake’s camp so you can help if he comes for the girl. Be watchful.” He loped over to the bluffs, nearly a mile away, picked his way to the top and spread his bedroll on the bluff’s edge. In the clear night, with the huge moon, he could see far across the bedded herd, see the bright wick of the campfire, blocked occasionally when someone led a horse across in front of it.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Lorie, you’re a sight,” he said. “I guess I bungled this opportunity. You’d think I’d get smoother, experienced as I am.” She kept silent. Gus was nearly out of sight before she looked up. She still felt the anger.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“I got a bottle in my bag,” Roscoe said. “You’re welcome to share it.” He assumed that such an offer would assure him a place at the table, but the assumption was wrong. The old man took the whiskey bottle when he offered it, and then sat right on the stump and drank nearly all of it. Then he got up without a word and disappeared into the dark cabin. He did not reappear. Roscoe sat on the stump—the only place there was to sit—and the darkness got deeper and deeper until he could barely see the cabin fifteen feet away. Evidently the old man and the girl had no light, for the cabin was pitch-dark.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“We didn’t fight on the wrong side,” Call said. “What’s a miracle is that you stayed on the right side of the law for as long as you have. Jake’s too cowardly to be much of an outlaw, but you ain’t.” “I may be one yet,” Augustus said. “It’d be better than ending up like Tobe Walker, roping drunks for a living. Why, the man nearly cried when we left, he wanted to come so bad. Tobe used to be quick, and look at him now, fat as a gopher.” “It’s true he’s put on weight, but then Tobe was always chunky built,” Call said. On that one, though, he suspected Gus was right. Tobe had looked at them sadly when they mounted to ride away.AS FAR AS ROSCOE WAS CONCERNED, travel started bad and got worse. For one thing, it seemed he would never find Texas, a fact that preyed on his mind. From all indications it was a large place, and if he missed it he would be laughed out of Fort Smith—assuming he ever got back.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“It’s dern likely,” Augustus said. “If I can find a squaw I like, I’m apt to marry her. The thing is, if I’m going to be treated like an Indian, I might as well act like one. I think we spent our best years fighting on the wrong side.” Call didn’t want to argue with nonsense like that. They were nearly to the edge of town, passing a few adobe hovels where the poorer Mexicans lived. In one of them a baby cried. Call was relieved to be leaving. With Gus on the prod, anything could happen. In the country, if he got mad and shot something, it would probably be a snake, not a rude bartender.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
BEFORE THE HERD HAD PASSED San Antonio they nearly lost Lippy in a freak accident with the wagon. It was a hot day and the herd was moseying along at a slow rate. The mosquitoes were thinning a little, to everyone’s satisfaction, and the cowboys were riding along half asleep in their saddles when the trouble started.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“This ain’t a well-thought-out journey,” Augustus remarked. “Even if we get these cattle to Montana, who are we gonna sell ’em to?” “The point ain’t to sell ’em next week,” Call said. “The point is to get the land. The people will be coming.” “Why are we taking that ugly bull?” Augustus asked. “If the land’s all that pretty, it don’t need a lot of ugly cattle on it.” To their relief the crossing went off well. The only commotion was caused by Jasper, who charged the river at a gallop and caused his horse to stumble and nearly fall.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
When he awoke he got a shock almost worse than if he had found the rattler curled on his chest: Louisa was standing astraddle of him. Roscoe was so tired that it was only his brain that had come awake, it seemed. He would ordinarily havereacted quickly to the sight of anyone standing astraddle of him, much less a woman, but in this case his limbs were so heavy with sleep that he couldn’t move a one: opening his eyes was effort enough. It was nearly sunup, still sultry and humid. He saw that Louisa was barefoot and that her feet and ankles were wet from the dewy grass. He couldn’t see her face or judge her disposition, but he felt a longing to be back on his couch in the jail, where crazy things didn’t happen.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Ed’s a snake,” Louisa said. “Big rattler. I named him after my uncle, because they’re both lazy. I let Ed stay around because he holds down the rodents. He don’t bother me and I don’t bother him. But he hangs out around to the back, so watch out where you throw down your blanket.” Roscoe did watch. He stepped so gingerly, getting his bedding arranged, that it took him nearly twenty minutes to settle down. Then he couldn’t get the thought of the big snake off his mind. He had never heard of anyone naming a snake before, but then nothing she did accorded with any procedure he was familiar with. The fact that she had mentioned the snake meant that he had little chance of getting to sleep. He had heard that snakes had a habit of crawling in with people, and he definitely didn’t want to be crawled in with. He wrapped his blanket around him tightly to prevent Ed from slipping in, but it was a hot sultry night and he was soon sweating so profusely that he couldn’t sleep anyway. There were plenty of grass and weeds around, and every time anything moved in the grass he imagined it to be the big rattler. The snake might get along with Louisa, but that didn’t mean he would accept strangers.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇