Stalking-horse

1. n. Fig.: Something used to cover up a secret project; a mask; a pretense.
2. n. A horse, or a figure resembling a horse, behind which a hunter conceals himself from the game he is aiming to kill.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.