Which preposition to use with balked
Another hour was over; there were but two miles before him to the Gap: but the old mare panted and balked at every ditch across the road.
"I want something and I don't know what to want" is the expression of a state very frequent in children, and not infrequent in grown-up people, because they have been balked of something.
O'Brien made a costly balk in the first inning and the Boston players generally seemed to be less energetic and less confident than would have been expected from a team which had but one game to win to make the championship assured.
Others merely "listed" the fields by first running a furrow with a shovel plow where each cotton or corn row was to be and filling it with a single furrow of a turn plow from either side; then when planting time approached they would break out the remaining balks with plows, turning the soil to the lists and broadening them into rounded plant beds.
When the music to which Tom plays secondo is strictly classical, he sometimes balks for an instant in passages; to do otherwise would argue a creative power equal to that of the master composers; but when any chordant harmony runs through it, (on which the glowing negro soul can seize, you know,) there are no "false accords," as with the infant Mozart.
Patsy balked on the third slice of toast and took it away from him.
But, at all events, the colonel's besetting infirmity was always to shrink from making changes; instinctively he balked against commission of any action which would alter his relations with accustomed circumstances or persons.
If asked the courses, I balk after the recital of the soup.
But suppose a tube let down from the moon, with yourself at one end, and the man at the other; it would be some balk to the spirit of conversation, if you knew that the dialogue exchanged with that interesting theosophist would take two or three revolutions of a higher luminary in its passage.
One day, after the first freeze this winter, I was Balking along a little pond.