词汇：scarcely

adv. 简直没有；几乎不，简直不

相关场景

As Call was getting into his wagon, a newspaperman ran up, a red-headed boy scarcely twenty years old, white with excitement at what he had just seen.>>完整场景

He rode through Denver, remembering that he had never sent Wilbarger’s brother the telegram he had promised, notifying him of Wilbarger’s death. It had been a year and he felt he owed Wilbarger that consideration, though he soon regretted coming into the town, a noisy place filled with miners and cattlemen. The sight of the buggy with the coffin excited such general curiosity that by the time he was out of the telegraph office a crowd had gathered. Call had scarcely walked out the door when an undertaker in a black hat and a blue bow tie approached him.>>完整场景

The next morning Lorena still stood by the buggy. The men scarcely knew what to think about it. Call was perplexed. Clara made breakfast as silently as she had presided over supper. They could all look out the window and see the blond girl standing like a statue by the buggy, the letter from Augustus clutched in her hand.>>完整场景

“Yes, I remember our picnics,” she said. “We mostly quarreled. He wanted what I wouldn’t give. I wanted what he didn’t have. That was a long time ago, before my boys died.” Tears came to her eyes when she said it, as they always did when the thought of her boys struck her. She was aware that she was being anything but hospitable, and that the man didn’t understand what she said. She scarcely knew what she meant herself—she just knew that the sight of Woodrow Call aroused in her an unreasoning hate and disgust.>>完整场景

Then, before he had scarcely reined in at Clara’s house, where he found Dish Boggett breaking horses with the young sheriff from Arkansas, the woman began a quarrel with him. She had acquired some small shrubs somehow and was out planting them, bareheaded and in overshoes, when he arrived.>>完整场景

“I tolt you, Pa,” he said. “Now we’re caught.” The old man, who had a jug beside his saddle, was clearly drunk, and seemed scarcely conscious of what was occurring.>>完整场景

Watching Lorena, as she sat blank with grief every day, scarcely stirring unless Betsey urged her to, Clara felt helpless.>>完整场景

“Well, I meant she was in her younger days,” Jasper said. “I don’t know what she does for a living now.” Dish stalked off in a cold silent fury. He had resented many of the men throughout the whole trip because of their casual talk about Lorie and saw no reason for elaborate goodbyes. Po Campo hung him with so many provisions that he could scarcely mount.>>完整场景

That night, camping alone, he dreamed of Gus. Frequently he woke up to hear Gus’s voice, so real he looked around expecting to see him. Sometimes he would scarcely fall asleep before he dreamed of Gus, and it was even beginning to happen in the daytime if he rode along not paying much attention to his surroundings. Gus dead invaded his thoughts as readily as he had when he was alive. Usually he came to josh and tease, much as he had in life. “Just because you’ve got to the top of the country, you don’t have to stop,” he said, in one dream. “Turn east and keep going until you hit Chicago.” Call didn’t want to turn east, but neither did he particularly want to stop. Gus’s death, and the ones before it, had caused him to lose his sense of purpose to such an extent that he scarcely cared from one day to the next what he was doing. Hekept on going north because it had become a habit. But they had reached the Milk River and winter was coming, so he had to break the habit or else lose most of the men and probably the cattle too.>>完整场景

OLD HIGH AULD soon replaced Augustus as the main talker in the Hat Creek outfit. He caught up with the herd, with his wagonload of coats and supplies, near the Missouri, which they crossed near Fort Benton. The soldiers at the tiny outpost were as surprised to see the cowboys as if they were men from another planet. The commander, a lanky major named Court, could scarcely believe his eyes when he looked up and saw the herd spread out over the plain. When told that most of the cattle had been gathered below the Mexican border he was astonished, but not too astonished to buy two hundred head. Buffalo were scarce, and the fort not well provisioned.>>完整场景

“Where’d you come from, stranger?” the old man asked. He rose to his feet but did not exactly straighten up. His back was bent. To Augustus he seemed scarcely five feet tall.>>完整场景

He woke up bitterly cold to find it was snowing. A squall had blown in. Pea Eye heard a strange sound and took a minute to realize it was his own chattering teeth. His feet were so sore he could scarcely walk on them, and the snow didn’t help.>>完整场景

Call had scarcely spoken since the death of Deets, but the beauty of the high prairies, the abundance of game, the coolness of the mornings finally raised his spirits. It was plain that Jake Spoon, who had been wrong about most things, had been right about Montana. It was a cattleman’s paradise, and they were the only cattlemen in it. The grassy plains seemed limitless, stretching north. It was strange that they had seen no Indians, though. Often he mentioned this to Augustus.>>完整场景

“Well, my lord,” he said, from time to time. “My lord.” An Indian boy had killed him, the Captain said. Deets was still wearing a pair of the old patchy quilt pants that he had favored for so long. Pea Eye scarcely knew what to think. He and Deets had been the main hired help on the Hat Creek outfit ever since there had been a Hat Creek outfit. Now it was down to him. It would mean a lot more chores for him, undoubtedly, for the Captain only trusted the two of them with certain chores. He remembered that he and Deets had had a pretty good conversation once. He had been vaguely planning to have another one with him if the chance came along. Of course that was off, now. Pea Eye went over and leaned against a wagon wheel, wishing he could stop feeling weak in the legs.>>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

“I don’t know whether to envy you or pity you, Miss Wood,” Clara said. “Riding all that way with Mr. McCrae, I mean. I know he’s entertaining, but that much entertainment could break a person for life.” Then Clara laughed, a happy laugh—she was amused that Augustus had seen fit to arrive with a woman, that she had stunned her girls by kissing him, and that Woodrow Call, a man she had always disliked and considered scarcely more interesting than a stump, had been able to think of nothing better to say to her after sixteen years than “How do you do?” It added up to a lively time, in her book, and she felt she had been in Nebraska long enough to deserve a little liveliness.>>完整场景

Newt was so surprised that he scarcely knew where to look.>>完整场景

Call tried to caution them a little, mentioning that there were said to be Indians on the rampage, but the men scarcely heard him. Even Dish Boggett was in a fever to go. Call let six men go in first: Dish, Soupy, Bert, Jasper, Needle and the Irishman. They all put on fresh shirts and raced away as if a hundred Comanches were after them.>>完整场景

But, as abruptly as he had started, the baby stopped crying. He whimpered a time or two, stuck his fist in his mouth, and then simply stared at July again as he had at first. July was so relieved that he scarcely moved.>>完整场景

Clara and Cholo left and July slowly ate his breakfast, feeling guilty. Then he remembered what had happened—Ellie was gone, into Indian country. He had to go after her as soon as he ate. The baby, still on the table, gurgled at him. July had scarcely looked at it, though it seemed a good baby. Clara wanted it, the girls fought over it, and yet Ellie had left it.>>完整场景

Clara laughed. “Go to bed,” she said. “I’ve worried you enough for one night.” He went, but the next morning at breakfast he didn’t look much better or feel much better. He would scarcely talk to the girls, both of whom doted on him. Clara sent them off to gather eggs so she could have a word or two more with July in private.>>完整场景

Clara saw at once that he had sustained some blow. When she saw him come back without even the mail, it had been on her tongue to say something about his poor memory. She and the girls hungered for the magazines and catalogues that came in the mail, and it was a disappointment to have someone ride right past the post office and not pick them up. But July looked so low that she refrained from speaking. At the supper table she tried several times to get a word or two out of him, but he just sat there, scarcely even touching his food. He had been ravenous since coming off the plains—so whatever the blow was, it was serious.>>完整场景

“I was born on the Hudson, you know,” he said, a little later. “I fully expected to die on it, but I guess the dern Arkansas will have to do.” “I wish you’d stop talking about your own death,” Augustus said in a joking tone. “It ain’t genteel.” Wilbarger looked at him and chuckled, a chuckle that brought up blood. “Why, it’s because I ain’t genteel that I’mbleeding to death beside the Arkansas,” he said. “I could have been a lawyer, like my brother, and be in New York right now, eating oysters.” He didn’t speak again until after it was full dark. Newt stood over with the horses, trying not to cry. He had scarcely known Mr. Wilbarger, and had found him blunt at first, but the fact that he was lying there on a bloody blanket dying so calmly affected him more than he had thought it would. The emptiness of the plains as they darkened was so immense that that affected him too, and a sadness grew in him until tears began to spill from his eyes. Captain Call and Mr. Gus sat by the dying man. Deets was on the riverbank, a hundred yards away, keeping watch. And Pea Eye stood with Newt, by the horses, thinking his own thoughts.>>完整场景

At close range she looked younger, perhaps only fifteen or sixteen. Probably she had scarcely even had beaux, or if she had, they would only have been farm boys with no knowledge of the world. She had a curling upper lip, which he liked—it indicated she had some spirit. If she had been a whore, he would have contracted with her for a week, just on the strength of that lip and the curve of her bosom. But she was just a barefoot girl sitting on a wagon, with dust on her bare feet.>>完整场景

Elmira was apprehensive, fearing a fight then and there, but Zwey seemed to have forgotten the whole business. About the time Luke rode up they spotted two or three buffalo and immediately rode off to shoot them, leaving Elmira to drive the wagon. They came back after dark with three fresh hides, and seemed in good spirits. Luke scarcely looked at her. He and Zwey sat up late, cooking slices of buffalo liver. They were both as bloody as if they’d been skinned. Elmira hated the smell of blood and kept away from them as best she could.>>完整场景