Mavy, known on the camp books as Peter Maverick1, received the summons to the boss's shack2 with his customary silence. For a moment after Conrad delivered the message he hesitated, then, nodding shortly, he swung into the trestle and began to clamber up by way of the hundred and fifty feet of network supports, scorning the path that led up the bank before the foreman's shack. With a puzzled shake of his head Conrad watched the strange figure growing smaller.
"A hundred of him," he muttered, "and they could take the whole bunch of bohunks. If he's a specimen3 of the wild Indian, Lord only knows what right we had to clean them out of the land. Mr. Torrance would say it was because they never build railways."
To the bohunks, mildly staring after the vanishing halfbreed, his method of reaching the top was merely foolishly exhausting; but several weeks of acquaintance had taught them to accept his silent peculiarities4 with nothing more than casual wonder, though they disliked him for his unsociability, for the cold contempt that twisted his lips, and for the stifled5 volcano that smouldered within his squinting6 eyes. They hated him more than ever now, with a hatred7 that could be liquidated8 only in blood. Their own criminal schemes that had taken the lives of two of their companions they did not consider, but the man who had exposed the cause of the deaths, and had made them sweat unrequited hours for exercising the only weapon they knew in their relentless9 fight against their bosses, must answer to them for his temerity10 and treason. Hereafter the halfbreed was just prey11; sooner or later he would fall before the slumbering12 fires that knew no law but the knife, no restraint but fear.
"Hey? Where did you come from?"
"Yuh sent fer me, didn't yuh?"
"I thought you were down bossing the Koppy job."
"Sartin. We jest was through when he tol' me."
Mavy nodded. "I come by the trestle."
"The h--you did!"
"How'd you like to be an underforeman?"
Again the wide, sloping shoulders shrugged.
"Say, you don't mean you'd turn down an extra dollar a day?"
"Koppy's underforeman, ain't he?" The halfbreed spat18 with disgust, and Torrance chuckled19 sympathetically.
"If I did that every time I felt like it about Koppy, I'd be as dry as a camp-meeting in three days. You're not afraid of him, are you?"
Mavy grinned.
"Because Koppy's going to be some busy for the next few weeks hanging out under that trestle, and we'll need another underforeman perhaps."
The squinting eyes took on a sudden gleam, even a keen anticipation20 that could not escape the contractor's attention.
"An' wud I be bossin' 'em about, them bohunks? Wud yuh let me do as I liked?"
"Well," smiled Torrance, "not quite what you liked; you'd be under the foreman and me, you know."
The halfbreed sighed. "That's allus the way. Suthin's allus foolin' me. 'Cause ef yuh'd gi' me a free hand thar'd be a dozen er so less bohunks the fus' night fer supper. I jes' natcherl hate hidin' my feelin's." He repeated the sigh more hopelessly. "Yuh'd never git the work did; thar ain't bohunks enough in the world."
"If I could," he whispered, "I'd make you foreman this instant, and round up all the bohunks out of jail. But that ain't what I want you for. Are you a real Indian?"
"Naw," drawled Mavy. "I'm a Chinee, with a bit o' Pole thrown in."
Torrance showed he could appreciate humour like that. "I mean, can you follow a trail?"
The halfbreed's eyes danced. "Take a run in the bush," he said proudly, "an' to-morrow I'll take yuh over it agin t' the foot. Kin22 I foller a trail! Gor-swizzle! It's wot I done most o' my born days."
The contractor ruminated23. Much as he dreaded24 the interference of the Police in the matter of the stolen horses, he hesitated about entrusting25 their recovery to this strange Indian; and a tardy26 thought came to him that the Police might question it. He cast the die in favour of his first plan.
"You know them horses we been losing?"
Mavy kept his eyes fixed27 on the contractor's face, but he knew the location of door and window with the unerring sense of the trapped wild thing.
"If you can find the thief--or who he is--there's under-foreman's pay for you. A dollar a day more--if money's any use to you. Will you take it on?"
"No."
The reply was prompt and uncompromising. Torrance, flaming as usual before unexpected opposition28, was about to fire him on the spot, when the noise of metal against metal drew Tressa to the door.
"It's Constable29 Williams and a new Policeman--a Sergeant30. Father's here, Mr. Williams. He was sending for you. There's been a dreadful accident. A piece of the trestle fell and killed two of the men."
As Tressa stepped back to let the Policeman enter, the halfbreed slid unobtrusively to the other side of the room and stood in the semi-obscurity facing the doorway, his back tight against the wall.
"Yes," stormed Torrance, "and if it had killed a dozen of them it would have served them right. They'd taken out the bolts and cut a rope."
Constable Williams, blinking at the sudden darkness of the sitting room, stepped aside and made way for a straight, bronzed figure wearing the stripes of a Sergeant, who was already acknowledging with a winning smile Tressa's unspoken welcome.
"Torrance, shake hands with Sergeant Mahon. He's been sent up to clear--"
The halfbreed, his squinting eyes staring as at a ghost, seemed to make only a single movement. Then the entire window crashed out, and a pair of heavy boots disappeared over the sill.
For one brief moment the contractor and his daughter were stupefied. Not so Sergeant Mahon. With the crash he was at the door, tugging31 at his belt. But Tressa was in the way, and by the time he reached the open only a tiny cloud of dust rising above the edge of the steep drop to the river bottom told the way the halfbreed had gone.
The Sergeant rushed to the bank and looked down the hundred-and-fifty foot wall with a gasp32. No need for a revolver there. With a shudder33 he drew back.
Torrance stormed up beside him, rifle in hand.
"Where is he? Why don't you shoot? Let me--"
"What's he been doing?"
"Doing?" yelled the contractor. "Didn't you see that whole window--didn't you--"
"We don't shoot men for that."
Tressa came to the rescue:
"He's an Indian, one of the bohunks. I didn't know he'd done anything. We were talking to him when you came. Daddy wanted to make him underforeman, but he refused. And now"--she peered in awe35 over the edge--"he's killed."
"Guilty conscience, I guess," commented the Sergeant. "Lots of them are taken that way when they see the uniform--though I don't recall quite such a sudden and successful attempt at suicide."
"Suicide!" snorted Torrance, who was lying down where he could see the scene below. "Suicide nothing! That chap's a human cat--or he ain't human at all. He came up by the trestle; this is just another way to get down. Look at that dust! He's not falling, not him! He's just kicking up a dust so we can't see, and all the time he's breaking his up record. He's not dropping fast enough to hurt himself . . . but, by hickory! where he finds toe-holds on that cliff beats me."
They were all craning over. Down below, the bohunks were scattering36 like frightened sheep, while those further out gaped37. The dust-cloud struck the bottom and spread, and out of it emerged a running figure, limping a little but covering the ground with surprising speed. Tag ends of clothing hung to him, and from head to foot he was the colour of earth.
Torrance cheered. "Hurrah38! I'm surer than ever I made no mistake offering him the job . . . and I'll pay for the window myself, by hickory!"
Mahon was watching him with a faint smile.
"It's a lively reception to give a stranger. Is there more to the programme?"
"If there is," replied Torrance, "I'm only one of the innocent audience. That guy's beaten the limit three times inside as many hours. He's a continuous performance. He did a few careless flips39 and tumbles down there to get out of the way of that pole, then he swings up by way of the trestle while you'd say 'Jack40 Robinson.' He's gone down again," he added, measuring with his eye the dizzy height, "by way of Providence41. Wouldn't you say he'd got the wrong job out here, even if he is an Indian?"
"Was it Mavy?" asked Constable Williams.
"We call him Mavy, but he's a blooming sparrow, or a toy balloon."
"An Indian who's been working on construction," Williams explained to his superior, "a strange, silent fellow. Always seemed a bit above the job. Peter Maverick was his name."
Mahon started violently. His heart had made a bound that almost suffocated42 him. Before his eyes swept a picture of a court of so-called justice, with a big half breed giving evidence for the Police in a rustling43 case. The Judge, ignorantly persisting in his demand for a name for a child of nature who had all his life been content with "Blue Pete," had swallowed an invention of the moment, though every rancher in the room laughed at the ludicrously unfit term they knew so well. "Peter Maverick," the halfbreed had replied without a smile.
The Sergeant closed his eyes with a weary shake of the head. The picture had faded before another--the halfbreed wounded to death by a bullet he had drawn44 to his own chest to save the Police friend for whom it was intended.
Mahon passed a hand across his moist brow. "I knew a cowboy once--best friend I ever had--best a man could have. He gave that name once because he had no other to give. . . . He, too, was part Indian. Peter's a common Indian name. . . . He's dead now. He gave his life for me."
"That was Blue Pete, wasn't it?" asked Williams. "We got some of the story up here. He was working with us down there at Medicine Hat, wasn't he?"
The Sergeant moved toward the shack. "That drop makes me dizzy."
Within the shack Tressa laid a sympathetic hand on his.
"You'd better tell us about it, hadn't you? You're thinking a lot."
He smiled sadly into her tender eyes. "There's not much to tell," he began, "at least, not in quantity. Blue Pete was the whitest man that ever lived, the whitest of any colour. Yet he died a rustler47--giving his life gladly for one who had done nothing more for him than call him friend. He was no rustler at heart. For years he had stolen horses and cattle in the Badlands of Montana, because, as he said, every one rustled48 there, more or less; he was brought up to it. Perhaps he did a bit more than the others, but that was because he knew more tricks. I came on him just north of the border. He'd come across before the rifles of two cowboys who hated him so badly they'd quite forgotten that he could have picked them off with ease any time he wished. Though he was the best shot in the Badlands, he never used his rifle till he had to; and for days he'd been running before them."
He looked about the room, feeling the silence. To him it was as a tribute to his dead friend.
"I took him in to the Inspector49. He became a detective for us. You see, the rustlers were getting a bit the better of us because they knew the Cypress50 Hills and we never had force enough to take time to study them. Blue Pete didn't need to. He could pick up a trail anywhere and follow it like a blood-hound. . . . I learned a little from him; that's why I'm up here. With his assistance we ran down some of the rustlers. It was he proved to us that our own ranchers were among the rustlers--proved it to his own destruction. It was at the trial of one of them that he received the blow that sent him wild again. For a week he'd been on the trail of that fellow, a man we'd long suspected, half rancher, half hotel-keeper, and his nerves were a bit raw from lack of sleep and being forced into the open. You see, it meant giving up all the cow-punching he loved, for no rancher would employ him then."
A flash of anger lit the Sergeant's face.
"The Judge questioned his evidence--doubted it--even censured51 the Police for using such an acknowledged rustler. . . . Pete left the courtroom straight for the old game . . . and I, his old friend--I was put on his track. It was my duty. In the meantime some of his old companions from the Badlands crossed the border. I don't know whether Blue Pete joined up with them or not. If he did there are so many things can't be explained. We caught a few of them--including a white girl who--who also had gone wild. She was--a friend of mine, too, once. When we caught her brothers, who owned one of the best ranches52 in the district, the 3-bar-Y, and they--killed themselves, she just broke away. She and Blue Pete worked together. I think they loved each other. It was a crazy venture of hers that put her in our hands. She got six months. . . .
"It was spring when she came out, early spring this year. A gang of Badland rustlers got into the Hills. We surrounded them, and I went in with one companion on a trail of blood from a lucky shot we'd got at them when they tried to break through for the border. The wounded man ambushed53 me . . . but Blue Pete--he'd been creeping along beside me all the time--took the bullet instead of me. He managed to tell me the rustlers' rendezvous54, and then something struck me on the head and I dropped. My companion came to my assistance then. I guess I was half-crazy from the blow, and from the awful wound I'd seen in Pete's chest, because when we closed in on the rendezvous that night I took fool chances. I jumped in alone. Dutch Henry had my life in his hands when Blue Pete fired from the shadows. . . . Somehow he'd dragged himself there to be on hand. He saved my life again. . . . He died for it."
Constable Williams cleared his throat. Torrance was silent. Tressa leaned forward and touched Mahon's sleeve.
"We never found his body. Mira Stanton, the girl I told you of, buried him where we never could find. She wrote us . . . and she hated us. There's a rough stone to his memory down there on the edge of the Cypress Hills. It reminds the few of us who see it of my friend, simple, plain, rugged16, lasting56. There's no name on it, just 'Greater Love.'"
"You didn't find him? What was he like?" Tressa's face was flushed.
"A big, slouching sort of figure, but with a world of muscle you'd never suspect. The face of an Indian, but lighter57; it's bluish tint58 gave him his name. A smile that made you forget anything but that he was your friend; a square jaw59, squinting eyes--"
"Was his face very thin, almost haggard, with hollows under the eyes, and one shoulder lower than the other?"
Mahon smiled at her excitement. "No, his face lurked60 a little heavily, waiting only for that wonderful smile, but it wasn't haggard. And his shoulders were twin towers of strength."
"Oh," she sighed, "then it isn't him."
"I can assure you, Miss Torrance, that there's not a grain of hope to raise. Whom does my friend resemble?"
"Why, Peter Maverick--just some ways."
For a moment he seemed startled, almost frightened, then he smiled indulgently.
"It only means they're both of Indian strain, have crooked61 eyes (a not uncommon62 combination), and happened to toy with the same invented name that is taken from the herds63. Nothing more. . . . If I thought Blue Pete would throw himself through a window and down a bank like that at sight of me--"
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "He wouldn't, of course. But wouldn't it have been a story?"
"The sort of story that never happens even in books," he sighed.
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1
maverick
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| adj.特立独行的；不遵守传统的；n.持异议者，自行其是者 | |
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shack
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| adj.简陋的小屋，窝棚 | |
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specimen
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| n.样本，标本 | |
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peculiarities
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| n. 特质, 特性, 怪癖, 古怪 | |
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stifled
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| （使）窒息， （使）窒闷( stifle的过去式和过去分词 )； 镇压，遏制； 堵 | |
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squinting
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| 斜视( squint的现在分词 )； 眯着眼睛； 瞟； 从小孔或缝隙里看 | |
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7
hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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8
liquidated
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| v.清算( liquidate的过去式和过去分词 )；清除（某人）；清偿；变卖 | |
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9
relentless
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| adj.残酷的，不留情的，无怜悯心的 | |
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temerity
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| n.鲁莽，冒失 | |
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prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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12
slumbering
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| 微睡，睡眠（slumber的现在分词形式） | |
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doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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squinted
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| 斜视( squint的过去式和过去分词 )； 眯着眼睛； 瞟； 从小孔或缝隙里看 | |
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15
shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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rugged
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| adj.高低不平的，粗糙的，粗壮的，强健的 | |
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contractor
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| n.订约人，承包人，收缩肌 | |
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spat
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| n.口角，掌击；v.发出呼噜呼噜声 | |
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19
chuckled
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| 轻声地笑( chuckle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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anticipation
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| n.预期，预料，期望 | |
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21
liking
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| n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢 | |
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kin
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| n.家族，亲属，血缘关系；adj.亲属关系的，同类的 | |
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23
ruminated
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| v.沉思( ruminate的过去式和过去分词 )；反复考虑；反刍；倒嚼 | |
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24
dreaded
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| adj.令人畏惧的；害怕的v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的过去式和过去分词) | |
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entrusting
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| v.委托，托付( entrust的现在分词 ) | |
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tardy
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| adj.缓慢的，迟缓的 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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constable
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| n.(英国)警察，警官 | |
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sergeant
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| n.警官，中士 | |
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tugging
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| n.牵引感v.用力拉，使劲拉，猛扯( tug的现在分词 ) | |
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gasp
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| n.喘息，气喘；v.喘息；气吁吁他说 | |
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shudder
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| v.战粟，震动，剧烈地摇晃；n.战粟，抖动 | |
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deft
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| adj.灵巧的，熟练的（a deft hand 能手） | |
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awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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36
scattering
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| n.[物]散射；散乱，分散；在媒介质中的散播adj.散乱的；分散在不同范围的；广泛扩散的；（选票）数量分散的v.散射(scatter的ing形式)；散布；驱散 | |
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37
gaped
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| v.目瞪口呆地凝视( gape的过去式和过去分词 )；张开，张大 | |
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38
hurrah
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| int.好哇，万岁，乌拉 | |
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39
flips
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| 轻弹( flip的第三人称单数 )； 按（开关）； 快速翻转； 急挥 | |
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40
jack
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| n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克 | |
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41
providence
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| n.深谋远虑，天道，天意；远见；节约；上帝 | |
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42
suffocated
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| （使某人）窒息而死( suffocate的过去式和过去分词 )； （将某人）闷死； 让人感觉闷热； 憋气 | |
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43
rustling
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| n. 瑟瑟声，沙沙声 adj. 发沙沙声的 | |
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44
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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45
enquired
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| 打听( enquire的过去式和过去分词 )； 询问； 问问题； 查问 | |
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46
curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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47
rustler
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| n.[美口]偷牛贼 | |
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48
rustled
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| v.发出沙沙的声音( rustle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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49
inspector
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| n.检查员，监察员，视察员 | |
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50
cypress
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| n.柏树 | |
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51
censured
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| v.指责，非难，谴责( censure的过去式 ) | |
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ranches
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| 大农场， （兼种果树，养鸡等的）大牧场( ranch的名词复数 ) | |
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53
ambushed
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| v.埋伏( ambush的过去式和过去分词 )；埋伏着 | |
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54
rendezvous
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| n.约会，约会地点，汇合点；vi.汇合，集合；vt.使汇合，使在汇合地点相遇 | |
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55
cemetery
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| n.坟墓，墓地，坟场 | |
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56
lasting
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| adj.永久的，永恒的；vbl.持续，维持 | |
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57
lighter
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| n.打火机，点火器；驳船；v.用驳船运送；light的比较级 | |
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58
tint
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| n.淡色，浅色；染发剂；vt.着以淡淡的颜色 | |
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59
jaw
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| n.颚，颌，说教，流言蜚语；v.喋喋不休，教训 | |
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60
lurked
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| vi.潜伏，埋伏（lurk的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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61
crooked
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| adj.弯曲的；不诚实的，狡猾的，不正当的 | |
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62
uncommon
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| adj.罕见的，非凡的，不平常的 | |
参考例句： |
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63
herds
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| 兽群( herd的名词复数 )； 牧群； 人群； 群众 | |
参考例句： |
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