As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby...

No one spoke. There was none to curse and none to pray, we just watched.

There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in...

I aint drinkin after no mule, said the hermit. Have you not got no old bucket nor nothin?

They wont ride at night, said Brown. The recruit looked back at the figures gathered about the keg in that scoured and darkening waste. Why wont they? he said. Brown spat. Because it's dark, he said.

He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock...

They put their animals to the ford and crossed, the water up under the horses' bellies and the horses picking their way over the rocks and glancing wildly upstream where a cataract thundered out of...

He sat with his back to a rock and felt the warmth of the sun on his face and watched it pool and flare and drain away dragging with it all that pink and rose and crimson sky.

The subject was war. The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black. The judge smiled, his face shining with grease. What right man would have it any...

You might change your mind about what you hate to leave, he said.

Will you hide me? Hide you? Yes. The kid spat. You caint hide. Where you goin to hide at? Will he come back? I dont know. This is a terrible place to die in. Where's a good one?

They took council. On that raw tablestone the flames of their balefire swirled and circled and they studied the arrant blackness under them where it fell away like the sheer cloven face of the world.

They were all day among the dunes and in the evening coming down from the last low sandhills to the plain below among catclaw and crucifixion thorn they were a parched and haggard lot man and beast....

It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don't want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there.

For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent...

and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.

Almighty God, if it aint too far out of the way of things in your eternal plan do you reckon we could have a little rain down here.

The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether, said the judge. Moons,coins,men.

{God} He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

So what is the way of raising a child? At a young age, said the judge, they should be put in a pit with wild dogs. They should be set to puzzle out from their proper clues the one of three doors that...

Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded.

And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin?

He'd taken up a pallet between Toadvine and another Kentuckian, a veteran of the war. This man had returned to claim some darkeyed love he'd left behind two years before when Doniphan's command pulled...

They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bakeoven air which it rebated, the slant black...

The next day on the far side of the mountain we encountered the two lads that had deserted us. Hangin upside down in a tree. They'd been skinned and I can tell ye it does very little for a man's...

like some scurrilous king stripped of his vestiture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die.

after a while someone asked the expriest if it were true that at one time there had been two moons in the sky and the expriest eyed the false moon above them and said that it may well have been so....

The judge sat that animal bareback like an indian and rode with his grip and his rifle perched on the withers and he looked about him with the greatest satisfaction in the world, as if everything had...

one pounding coffeebeans in a buckskin with a rock while the others stared into the fire with eyes as black as gunbores.

Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.