Just as Newt mounted, a bolt of lightning struck the edge of the herd not a hundred feet from where the Captain rode. A number of cattle instantly fell, as if clubbed by the same club. It was as if a portion of the wall of cattle had broken and fallen to earth like so many bricks.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

Just as Newt mounted, a bolt of lightning struck the edge of the herd not a hundred feet from where the Captain rode. A number of cattle instantly fell, as if clubbed by the same club. It was as if a portion of the wall of cattle had broken and fallen to earth like so many bricks.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

Lorena lay where she had fallen, listening to Dog Face moan. With each breath he let out a throaty moan. His wound had bloody bubbles on it. Lorena got up on her hands and knees and vomited from fear. The Kiowas were all looking at her as they drank. She wanted to run but felt too weak. Anyway, they would soon catch her if she ran. She crawled away from the vomit and sank back, too tired and scared to move. Monkey John sat back from the fire, clutching his rifle. He didn’t even look at her—he wouldn’t help her. She was just in for it.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

While he was going from corpse to corpse collecting ammunition, he was startled to hear the sudden rattle of shots from the east. That was puzzling. Either the Indians had fallen to fighting among themselves or someone else had come on the scene. Then the shots ceased and he heard the sound of running horses—the Indians leaving, most probably.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“No, a beaver would be foolish to be in this river,” Augustus said. “There ain’t a tree within twenty miles, and beavers like to gnaw trees. You should have stayed up north if you like beavers.” “I’d rather gather these bones,” the old man said. “You don’t have to get your feet wet.” “Did you get to Montana when you was a beaverman?” Augustus waited several minutes for a reply, but the old man never answered. When the moon came up, Augustus saw that he had fallen asleep sitting on his wheelbarrow, his head fallen over in his arms.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

The old man didn’t answer. Darkness had fallen, and Augustus could barely see him sitting on his wheelbarrow.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

Luke got his dice out and soon they were playing. Elmira was able to sleep, but awoke to the roll of thunder a few hours later. The men were asleep by the dying fire. Across the prairie she began to see lightning darting down the sky, and within a few minutes big drops of water hit her. In a minute she was wet. She jumped down and crawled under the wagon. It wasn’t much protection but it was some. Soon lightning was crashing all around and the thunder came in big, flat cracks, as if a building had fallen down. It frightened her so that she hugged her knees and trembled. When the lightning struck, the whole prairie would be bathed for a second in white light.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“Strip off them duds,” the man repeated. He picked up Roscoe’s pistol, which had fallen in the grass, and pointed it at him.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“Let’s git,” he said. “We don’t want to miss the cool of the evening.” Once again they rode all night. Lorena slept in the saddle and would have fallen off if she hadn’t been tied in the stirrups.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

So many people think we saved them from the Indians that if you was to bring charges against us, and any of the boys that rangered with us got wind of it, they’d probably hang you. Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain’t much of a crime.” “John, I’d advise you to stop your name-calling,” Tobe said. “You’re acting too hot. You’d best just apologize and bring me a whiskey.” “I’ll be damned if I’ll do either one,” John said, and without another word stepped over the fallen bartender and wentback upstairs.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

The young man in the black coat went over behind the bar and looked at the fallen bartender.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

The cattle, still fresh to the trail, were not easily controlled. The brush was bad, the weather no better. It rained for three days and the mosquitoes were terrible. The men were not used to the night work and were irritable as hens. Bert Borum and Soupy Jones had an argument over how to hobble a horse and almost came to blows. Lippy had been put in charge of firewood, and the wood he cut didn’t suit Bolivar, who was affronted by Lippy’s very presence. Deets had fallen into one of his rare glooms, probably because he felt partly to blame for the boy’s death.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

She opened her eyes to blackness and a second later saw the lightning come to earth just across the river, cracking into the tree where they had made their first camp. The tree split at the top, then darkness fell, and when the next flash came the split part had fallen to the ground.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

All the same, he felt proud of Mouse, for many horses would have fallen, sliding into a gully.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

It was a good thing Deets had offered to help. Lorena’s mare balked and wouldn’t take the water. She would go in chest- deep and then whirl and climb back up the bank, showing the whites of her eyes and trying to run. Despite herself, Lorena felt her fear rising. Once, already, the mare had nearly fallen. She might really fall, trapping Lorena beneath the green water. She tried to control her fear—she would have to get across many rivers if she was to get to San Francisco—but the mare kept flouncing and trying to turn and Lorena couldn’t help being afraid. She could see Jake on the other bank. He didn’t look very concerned.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“How do, miss,” the black man said. Jake had fallen into a drowse and didn’t even know the man was there.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

July regarded the remark as irrelevant, for Roscoe knew well enough that the town had been without a dentist since Benny’s death. “Just watch old man Darton,” he said. “We don’t want him to fall off the ferry.” The old man lived in a shack on the north bank and merely came over for liquor. Once in a while he eluded Roscoe, and twice already he had fallen into the river. The ferrymen didn’t like him anyway, and if it happened again they might well let him drown.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“No, I ain’t got around to that task,” Augustus said. “Maybe I will if you tell me what difference it makes.” “It would be useful to know how many we’re starting out with,” Call said, “If we get there with ninety percent we’ll be lucky.” “Yes, lucky if we get there with ninety percent of ourselves,” Augustus said. “It’s your show, Call. Myself, I’m just along to see the country.” Dish Boggett had been dozing under the wagon. He sat up so abruptly that he bumped his head on the bottom of the wagon. He had had a terrible dream in which he had fallen off a cliff. The dream had started nice, with him riding along on the point of a herd of cattle. The cattle had become buffalo and the buffalo had started running. Soon they began to pour over a cutbank of some kind. Dish saw it in plenty of time to stop his horse, but his horse wouldn’t stop, and before he knew it he went off the bank, too. The ground was so far below, he could barely see it. He fell and fell, and to make matters worse his horse turned over in the air, so that Dish was upside down and on the bottom. Just as he was about to be mashed, he woke up, lathered in sweat.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“If Jake gets killed, tell her I will come,” Xavier said—there was always that prospect. After all, he had only met Therese because her first husband had fallen off a roof and broken his neck. A man like Jake, a traveler and a gambler, might meet a violent end at any time.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

Those feelings hadn’t come to the boy yet. He was a good boy, as gentle as the gray doves that came to peck for gravel on the flats behind the barn. He would try to do any task that was asked of him, and if he worried overmuch it was that he wasn’t good enough at his work to please the Captain. But then the whole outfit worried about that—all, at least, except Mr. Gus. Deets himself had fallen short a few times over the years and had felt the Captain’s displeasure afflict him like a bruise.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

But when the moon was just a little white hook, Deets tended to lose his worries. After all, water was still sweet, except for an alkaline river or two, like the Pecos. Perhaps if the Indians got on the moon, they had all fallen off.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

Augustus took the lead on a big white horse named Puddin’ Foot, and Jake Spoon followed him. Jake looked sour as clabber, which suited Dish fine. Maybe Lorena hadn’t fallen quite in love with him, after all.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

To the embarrassment of everyone, Sean O’Brien began to cry. It had been an extremely tense night, and he hadn’t expected to survive it. All during the ride he had expected to fall off his horse and become paralyzed. He associated paralysis with falls because a cousin of his had fallen off a cottage he was thatching and had been paralyzed ever since.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

He was in the middle of the company. It was Pea Eye’s traditional job to watch the rear. Newt rode beside Dish Boggett, who had not said one word since leaving and whose state Newt couldn’t judge, though at least he hadn’t fallen off his horse. The thin moon lit the sky but not the ground. The only landmarks were shadows, low shadows, mostly made by chaparral and mesquite. Of course, it was not Newt’s place to worry about the route, but it occurred to him that he had better try to keep some sense of where he was in case he got separated from the outfit and had to find his own way back.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“Yeah, but I’m just a gambler,” Jake said. “They all like to think they’re respectable back in Arkansas. Besides, the dentist’s brother was the sheriff, and somebody told him I was a gunfighter. He invited me to leave town a week before it happened.” Call sighed. All the gunfighter business went back to one lucky shot Jake had made when he was a mere boy starting out in the Rangers. It was funny how one shot could make a man’s reputation like that. It was a hip shot Jake made because he was scared, and it killed a Mexican bandit who was riding toward them on a dead run. It was Call’s opinion, and Augustus’s too, that Jake hadn’t even been shooting at the bandit—he was probably shooting in hopes of bringing downthe horse, which might have fallen on the bandit and crippled him a little. But Jake shot blind from the hip, with the sun in his eyes to boot, and hit the bandit right in the Adam’s apple, a thing not likely to occur more than once in a lifetime, if that often.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇