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We have frequently mustered as many as thirty horses at a meet; but on these occasions a picked spot is chosen where the sport may be easily witnessed by those who are unaccustomed to it. The horses may, in these instances, be available, but as a rule they are perfectly useless in elk-hunting, as the plains are so boggy that they would be hock-deep every quarter of a mile.

Keep this, won't you, and let's be friends, not enemies." He held it out, and the girl angrily struck the rose-leaf from his hand to her feet. Chad rode away at a walk. Two hundred yards below, where the hill rose, the road was hock-deep with sand, and Dixie's feet were as noiseless as a cat's. A few yards beyond a ravine on the right, a stone rolled from the bushes into the road.

To make matters worse, the route became swampy. Sometimes the horses sank nearly hock-deep in mud, which in the pitch darkness they could not avoid. In such places it required the force of thirty men to drag the gun, and the delays became serious.

He wanted to get back to the pastures where he had roamed untrammelled of old with his fellow-steers. The remembrance was in his heart of the dewy mornings when the herd used to feed together on the sweet grassy hillocks, and of the clover-smelling heats of June when they would gather hock-deep in the pools under the green willow-shadows.

Once, in the hollow of a gorge where a little stream trickled under layers of wet leaves, he saw a wild-boar standing hock-deep in the ooze, rooting under mosses and rotten branches, absorbed in his rooting. Twice deer leaped from the young growth on the edge of the fields and bounded lazily into denser cover, only to stop when half concealed and stare back at him with gentle, curious eyes.

Daintily her handsome horse set foot in the water, hesitated, bent his long, velvety neck, sniffed, and finally drank; then, satisfied, stepped quietly forward, hock-deep, in the swirling, yellow flood. "Foller them stakes, Miss," cautioned the older trooper; "I sot 'em m'self, I did." "Thank you. Keep close to me, Connor. I've crossed here before it was staked."

And it was in the rocky oak-ridges of the wild country under Cloudy Mountain that Miller had marked down the monarch of all wild pigs the great, shaggy, silver-tipped boar, hock-deep in snow, crunching frozen acorns and glaring off over the gully where mile after mile of white valley and mountain ranges stretched away, clotted and streaked with pine.

The mist was as thick as ever, but this seemed to make no difference to the idiot, as he guided them up the stream for a little distance and on over the rough yellow grass. The ground was very deep and much cut by tiny clefts that carried the water away from the bog, but the idiot went on straight and unconcerned as though he were on a high road, though often his pony floundered hock-deep.