Bears and panthers growled and were very terrible in that strange country.

He had invented an animal more treacherous than any in the woods, and he called it a swift.

'Sumthin' like a panther', he described the look of it a fearsome creature that lay in the edge of the woods at sundown and made a noise like a woman crying, to lure the unwary.

It would light one's eye with fear to hear Uncle Eb lift his voice in the cry of the swift.

Many a time in the twilight when the bay of a hound or some far cry came faintly through the wooded hills, I have seen him lift his hand and bid us hark.