"Balky" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ask me how, and I can't tell you. There wasn't a word, not a motion that I could see, but all the time it was one man driving the other as plain as could be. And it wasn't easy. I felt that young Henry was worse than balky, that he would have broke through the bushes and run off screaming if that old man had taken his eyes off of him ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... mice an' men must aft gang," like a balky horse—just opposite to what you want them to. I spoke to my acquaintances in the bar-room easily enough, but when one after one the fellows went up to the door of the ladies' dressing-room to escort their fair companions to the ball-room, I felt my courage oozing ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... face, that it seemed right to tack on the "Lonesome." So "Lonesome Huckleberries" he's been for ten years. He lives in the patchwork shanty on the beach down there, he is deaf and dumb, drives a liver-colored, balky mare that no one but himself and his daughter Becky can handle, and he has a love for bad rum and a temper that's landed him in the Wellmouth lock-up more than once or twice. He's one of the best gunners alongshore and at this time he owned a flock of live decoys ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... having the knowledge.] Mrs. Karslake? I saw her headed this way in a hansom with a balky horse only a minute ago. If she hoped to be ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... parents kin make the big mistake. O' keepin' down a boy like me 'at's got a name to make! It ain't no wonder boys is bad, an' balky as a mule; Life ain't worth livin' if you've got to waste your time ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... in a voice mixed of indignation and apprehension, "thet you sold him a balky horse, an' he's goin' to hev the law on ye." David's shoulders shook behind the sheltering page, and his mouth expanded in ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... peaches she lay, crying her eyes out. Up the hill toward her scrambled Ruloff; basket on shoulder; yelling abuse better fitted for the ears of a balky mule than for ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... might have been foreseen, was fatal to coherent and prompt co-operative action, and the result was properly described by Grant himself as comparable only to the work of a "balky team." It was in the nature of things impossible to make either the armies or the separate army-corps work harmoniously and effectively together. The orders issued from the different headquarters were necessarily lacking in uniformity of style and expression, and failed ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... he had been talking he had been tinkering with the motor, which was having a little balky spell. At his last words Jerry spoke ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... rights—they wuz jealous of each other, and greedy, as children will be; and they had their perplexities, and their deep troubles, and their vexations, as children must have in this world, and some wuz fractious, and some wuz balky, and some wuz good dispositioned, and some wuz cross and mean, and had to be ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... not mend its manners by noon; but so far from clearing off at noon, the storm increased in violence, and as night set in the wind whistled in a spiteful falsetto key, and the rain lashed the old tavern as if it were a balky horse that refused to move on. The windows rattled in the worm-eaten frames, and the doors of remote rooms, where nobody ever went, slammed to in the maddest way. Now and then the tornado, sweeping down the side of Mount Agamenticus, ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... not explain what impulse had made him bring a fiddle with him on the way to mend a balky gasoline engine. As a youth—they had called him rather a wild youth—he had often ridden through the Ozark hills at night time with his fiddle under his arm. But in the last eight years he had played the thing only once, and that once had come so near finishing him that he still ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... man had gone bad in the making, and that his Maker was angry at him to the end of time. And that same blundering and angry Maker was the God one had to love and honour. Naturally, being constituted as he is, Brenton, once he had cut his wisdom teeth, turned balky, refused to see why he should love a God who behaved like a bad-tempered child that spites the toy he has broken and beats the wall where he ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Dan's already now. Don't jerk the bit, fer his mouth's tender an' it makes him balky. Ef he balks jest let him rest a time, an' then speak to him. Dan ain't vicious; he's ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... set down at the end of the last paragraph drifted me somewhat from the regular thread of my narrative. This, perhaps, is not the only reason why I should stumble and shy along like a balky palfrey when I approach one of the trifling accidents which transpired immediately after ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... means I'm gettin' old; my settin' 'round balky this a- way. Thar's some seventy wrinkles on my horns; nothin' young or recent about that. Which now it often happens to me, like it does to old folks general, that jest when it begins to grow night, I gets moody an' bad. Looks like my thoughts has ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the son tried to convert him to Christianity. They argued and argued until midnight. Finally the father said, "Son, there is no use talking, you can't convert me if you argue all night; I am established." The next morning they went for a load of wood, and as they left the woods the horse got balky and wouldn't move an inch. "What is the matter with this horse, anyway?" asked the father. "Why," replied the son, "he is established." The Bible says, "Be ye not as the horse or as the mule, which have no understanding." ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... perfectly safe," said a second man. I was very indignant at being spoken to in this way and turned my back to them. The driver got the leaders in position, and then looking around, said to me that when the balky wheelers once started they would run up the hill "like the devil," and I would surely be left unless I was ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... ready when she got to the door. The engine was balky and bucky with the cold, and the chauffeur in a like mood. The roads were sleety and skiddy, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... on, "I don't promise anything—I can't, conscientiously. In getting a carriage out of the mud, more depends upon the horse than on the driver. Nature will have to do the work—I can't. All I can do is to guide her gently. If she's pushed, she gets balky. Maybe there's something ahead of her that I don't see, and there's no use spurring her ahead when she's got to stop and get her breath before she can ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... into the descent. Bud sent her down hill on compression, but at the bottom she refused to find her voice again when he turned on the switch and pressed the accelerator. She simply rolled down to the first incline and stopped there like a balky mule. ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... looked on at the scene with the same mild interest they would display at the whipping of a balky horse: and, now that the animal threatened to become dangerous, it was in their view quite the proper thing to put it out of the way. Don Pablo Peza stepped toward his mare to draw the machete from its scabbard. But he did not hand it to his friend. He heard a shout, ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... precipitous pathway cut in a side hill, when something happened. Perhaps it was a broken rail, or maybe a great boulder had toppled down the mountainside and lay upon the track; but the important thing was that suddenly, without a second's warning, the engine bucked like a balky broncho, and after one or two mad plunges along the roadbed, toppled over the bank and rolled into the gulley below. At the first impact of the locomotive with the long train behind it, the freight arched its back and writhed and twisted like a mighty serpent. ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes |
