"Wild-cat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out to the races in my curricle. Lady Lyndon fought very hard against this condescension; but I had a way with her, as the saying is, and though she had a temper, yet I had a better one. A temper, psha! A wild-cat has a temper, but a keeper can get the better of it; and I know very few women in the world whom I ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... clean over the ropes. A sullen rage grew in the Gorilla's heart. He wasn't doing himself justice. He wasn't having a fair show. This blasted half-set pink and white recruit hadn't given him time to settle down. A fifteen-round contest shouldn't be bustled like this! The bloke was more like a wild-cat than ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... can't make her out," he often said to himself, "I have an odd instinct which tells me that there is the sleeping lioness or the wild-cat hidden somewhere beneath all that languid, gracious carelessness. Poor little girl! she has managed to captivate us all, but I should not be surprised if she turned out more difficult and troublesome to manage than the whole of my seven ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... darkness on either bank, and made shadows so weird and changeful that the boys imagined they saw every form of wild beast and flight of strange bird with which pictures had made them familiar. Owls hooted in the distance. A wild-cat screamed like a frightened child. A partridge, waked from its perch by a flash of the torch, whirred off ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... retorted Joel, with a pause in the work of emptying the bag to investigate the animal in David's hand, "that's a wild-cat." ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney
... Master Seyfried, or Young Kubbeling, I often remember that he was ever wont to wear three wild-cats' skins, which he laid on his breast and on each leg, as a remedy against pains he had. And the falcon-seller, who was thick-set and broad-shouldered, was in truth not unlike a wild-cat in his unkempt shagginess, albeit free from all craft and guile. His whole mien, in his yellow leather jerkin slashed with green, his high boots, and ill-shaven face covered with short, grey bristles, was that of a woodsman who has grown strange to man in the forest wilds; howbeit we knew from ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... days the county abounded in the larger species of game common to the forests of North America. Among these were the beaver and otter, buffalo, deer, wolf, wild-cat, panther, bear, fox, and elk or wapiti (Cervus canadensis), noble herds of which ranged the mountain sides ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... zoras described by Caesar, which the English very ignorantly and erroneously call the buffalo. They have deer, of several kinds, and plenty of roe-bucks and rabbits. There are bears and wolves, which are small and timorous; and a brown wild-cat, without spots, which is very improperly called a tiger; otter, beavers, foxes, and a species of badger which is called raccoon. There is great abundance of wild fowls, namely, wild-turkey, partridges, doves of various kinds, wild-geese, ducks, teals, cranes, herons of ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... man looked as if he knew nothing at all about the matter, and was quite willing to take Burl's word for it and let the noise in question pass either for the bellowing of a buffalo bull-calf or for the mewing of a wild-cat kitten, he cared not a whistle which. By this time Burl had climbed back over the fence into the field, and was now slowly turning his horse and plow to run ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... because of the wild-cat and the hungry Kaffir dogs. It should be wide, to leave room for him. The ground was hard, with boulders of ironstone embedded in it. What did that matter? All the day through, and all through the night of wind-driven mists and faint moonlight, he ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... were savage in the extreme, and as the noise continued, he brought the muzzle of the gun to bear, and the click, click, made by the locks sounded so loudly in the still evening air, that the creature, whatever it was, probably a lemur or wild-cat, took alarm, bounded off, and ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... which your first article appears," Kendricks said, "Freudenberg will strike. Your life here will never be wholly safe. You will be encompassed with spies and enemies. Why, this wild-cat scheme of his of sending you off on some expedition was solely because you are the one man of whom he is afraid. He feared lest Carraby might make some hideous blunder in a crisis and that the country might demand you back. That is why he wanted ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had fondled him. It was of a strange dead pallor, with a yellow shiny web betwixt the fingers. All over it was a white fluffy dust, like the flour of a new-baked loaf. It lay thick on Sharkey's neck and cheek. With a cry of disgust he flung the woman from his lap; but in an instant, with a wild-cat bound, and a scream of triumphant malice, she had sprung at the surgeon, who vanished yelling under the table. One of her clawing hands grasped Galloway by the beard, but he tore himself away, and snatching a pike, held her off from him as she gibbered ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and all her alarms. If Lady Niton took nothing for granted at Tallyn, that was not, it seemed, the case with John Barton. He, on the contrary, took it for granted that everybody there was at least a good Radical, and as stoutly opposed as himself to the "wild-cat" and "Jingo" policy of the Government on the Indian frontier, where one of our perennial little wars was then proceeding. News had arrived that afternoon of an indecisive engagement, in which the lives of three English officers and some fifty ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... particular interest because of the moralizing of the heron at the end, making the form close to that of the two Jatakas. Possibly our story goes back to some old Buddhistic fable like these. The squirrel (or "wild-cat," as Bergafio's "Vocabulario," dated 1732, defines lamiran) is not a very happy substitution for the original ground-animal, whatever that was; for the squirrel could reach a fish hanging to dry almost as easily as a bird could. Besides, squirrels are not carnivorous. Doubtless the older meaning ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... Maurice, offering his evidence, and"—smiling whimsically across at Kennedy—"received a haughty letter in reply, assuring him that he was mistaken in the facts and that the writer did not dispute the verdict of the court. My brother rather suspected some wild-cat business, so before he went to Australia, some years later, he placed in my hands properly witnessed documents containing the true facts of the matter, and it was only when, through Mrs. Durward, we learned that Maurice had been cashiered from the Army, that the connection ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... been one to walk whither she did not list for any man. He could not imagine the possibility, well versed as he was, through his Shakespeare lessons, in the feminine heart, of his sister's yielding her proud maiden will to any man. He would as soon have thought of a wild-cat which he had trailed in the woods, which knew him as his mortal enemy, whose eyes had followed him with stealthy fury out of a way-side bush, to unbend from the crouch of its spring and walk purring ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... voice of the council, and who would account to the council for the things he did. So we named Fith-Fith the chief man. He was a strong man, too, and very cunning, and when he was angry he made noises just like that, fith-fith, like a wild-cat. ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... he pushed his comrade, and without condescending to look after him, and himself neither ascending nor descending, followed the flank of the mountain horizontally, hanging on by rocks, branches, and even by plants, with the strength and energy of a wild-cat, and soon found himself on firm ground before a small wooden hut, through which a light was visible. The adventurer went all around it, like a hungry wolf round a sheepfold, and, applying his eye to one of the openings, apparently saw what determined ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... Savings Company was a popular institution in Marlborough. There were conservative financiers who shook their heads and feared that its methods were not based on sound business principles and savored too much of wild-cat schemes and fraudulent speculations, but they were voted cranks by the majority, and the Consolidated Provident Savings Company grew and flourished. It paid large dividends, and its stockholders were duly impressed with the magnificence of its buildings and the ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... cried Jack, fitting an arrow to his bow, and discharging it so hastily that he missed the animal, and hit the earth about half a foot to one side of it. To our surprise the wild-cat did not fly, but walked slowly towards the ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... produced such startling results as cro-custards and gerani-umbrellas. When some one requested help in developing the theme of a disaster, Judge Arthur shouted from the animal table that he had attempted to draw a wild-cat-astrophe and the picture ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... said in anger, and the anger of man is never good, 'Can no one, then, tame this boy for me? He was making downright fun of you to your own face,' said I to the player. 'Do you not know some art by which you can tame this wild-cat?' Then he laughed maliciously, but I thought no more of the matter. The following day, however, he said, 'Now I have curbed the lad! You should only see how tame he is become; and should he ever again turn unruly, ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... "Halloa! This way! Come to the light!" When, as he held the curtain with one hand, and with the other raised the lamp and tried to pierce the gloom that filled the place, something rushed past him into the room like a wild-cat, and crouched down in ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... cousins; for my heart expands and rejoices and beats more freely among them, and doubtless, in the days which "I can hardly remember" (as Rosalind says of her Irish Rat-ship), I was a bear or a wolf, or what your people call a "panter" (i.e. a panther), or at the very least a wild-cat, with unlimited range of forest and mountain. [The forests and hill-tops of that part of Massachusetts had, when this letter was written, harbored, within memory of man, bears, panthers, and wild-cats.] That cottage by the lake-side haunts me; and to be able to realize that ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Ladles with two bowls. Handle with the head of an animal, probably a wild-cat, at the tip; figures of birds in ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... the moles, which were solemnly seated, nodded to and fro their enormous heads, showing their long yellow incisors, and seemed to sniff the air. Suddenly they all rushed towards their burrows. A jaquarete had scattered them by springing in among them. The new-comer, a species of wild-cat, with a coat of the darkest black, left two or three victims dead upon the ground, and then set ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... my letter?" he cried, "and knew not what had happened to me. It is that wife of mine, that cruel wild-cat! I sent the letter to my house, thinking, of course, it would find my daughter there. For where else ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... me back from the valley of the shadow the night before, in his search for food that day, found a luckless little wild-cat. And that cat without sauce or dressing ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... our live-stock: 17 pigs; 12 dozen hens and roosters; 3 turkeys; 1 gobbler; a cockatoo and a wild-cat. We have a fair breeze, and ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... comfortable. Under the moonlight the sharper bark of the coyote swells a chorus from the cliffs, and the rich note of the night-storm is accentuated by the long screech of the puma prowling on the heights. In daylight his brother, the wild-cat, reminds one of Tabby at home by the fireside. There is the lynx, too, among the rocks; and on the higher planes the deer, elk, and bear have their homes. In Green River Valley once roamed thousands of bison. The more arid districts have the fewest large animals, and conversely the more humid ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... kept alive. Hutton also writes: "I have a beautiful specimen alive, so savage that I dare not touch her." I should like to possess a young one, having been successful with many so-called savage animals. I had a wild-cat once which was very savage at first, but which ultimately got so tame as to lie in my lap whilst I was at work in office or writing, but she would never allow me to touch or stroke her; she would come and go of her own sweet will, and used to come daily, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... and I saw this: I saw Baleka, my sister, walking towards us, and on her shoulders was a kaross of wild-cat skins, and behind her were two soldiers. She walked proudly, holding her head high, and her step was like the step of a queen. Now she saw the sight of death, for the dead lay before her like black water in a sunless pool. A moment she stood shivering, having guessed all, then ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... year 1840, Mr. Scott became interested in the lake marine by the purchase of the brig Amazon, of 220 tons, then considered a craft of good size. At the time of the purchase, the West was flooded with wild-cat money, and specie was very scarce. The brig was sold by order of the Chancellor of Michigan, and specie demanded from the purchaser, a condition that made buyers shy. In 1842, Mr. Scott purchased the schooner John Grant, of 100 tons, and in the following three years ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... of any considerable quantity of Wisconsin currency is liable not only to the occasional loss consequent upon the absquatulation of a tricksy wild-cat, but also to great perplexity as to the name of the gentleman who countersigns the bills. These inscrutable counter-signatures are accomplished by ROBERT MENZIES, our excellent Deputy Bank Comptroller. His ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... the world, and he would lift his head, it might hardly seem the same face, so heavy was the lower jaw, so insistent and coercive his eye. But if he took off his hat to place therein his cotton bandana handkerchief or (if he were in luck and burdened with game) the scalp of a wild-cat—valuable for the bounty offered by the State—he showed a broad, massive forehead that added the complement of expression, and suggested a doubt if it were ferocity his countenance bespoke or force. His ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Fosse!" was his oath. "The honour to stand by you shall be mine, my Bardelys! You owe it me, for am I not in part to blame for all this ado? Nay, you'll not deny me. That gentleman yonder, with the wild-cat moustaches and a name like a Gascon oath—that cousin of Mironsac's, I mean—has the flair of a fight in his nostrils, and a craving to be in it. But you'll grant me the honour, will you not? Pardieu! It will earn ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... in the banking business. Have not they always told us, that when state or other banks issue paper money without the Government in the banking business to back up the issue, such money in case of a failure of the issuing bank became wild-cat money, and did they not say to us wild-cat money made paupers? Now they go squarely back on all they have taught us on the money question, and advocate the wild-cat money system themselves according ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... harsher fur, more brilliant or more varied colors, greater or less size—these form the whole extent of variety in the species; the skeleton of the cat of Angora differs in no regular and constant circumstances from the wild-cat ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... you given up hunting, Miss Tempest?" he asked one Sunday afternoon, when they had gone the round of the stables, and Arion had been fondled and admired—a horse as gentle as an Italian greyhound in his stable, as fiery as a wild-cat ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... thing to be pleasantly oblivious of private debts, to omit cheques in repayment of various necessaries got at the Stores by an obliging sister-in-law. One thing to muddle away in wild-cat speculations a wife's money that, but for the procrastination of an easy-going father, would have been tightly tied up—quite another to bring himself so nearly within the clutches of the law as to make it possible for the Government ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... shall ask little or none; and that, such is his regard for him, it is a matter of no moment whether he live in Lowell or Louisiana, in New Bedford or Nebraska, or whether he pay New England bank-notes within thirty days, or wild-cat money and wild lands, which may be converted into cash, with more or less expense and loss, somewhere between nine months and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... certainly make her smart for her folly. The bad end, which he always prophesied for anyone who did not conform to his arrogant decrees, loomed imminent and forbidding. He was little better than a monster, with no more paternal instinct than the wild-cat. He would only chuckle and rub his hands in glee at the thought of her humiliation in the eyes of her friends. He might accuse the rector of complicity in her fraud. He would spread ruin around, ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... and though perhaps at first they may have had their doubts, they gradually came to accept the statement without question. They came to regard it as a kind of right to have little Hans sit on the top of the log pile when they worked, or running along the chute, while the wild-cat strings of logs shot down the steep slide with lightning speed. They were not in the least afraid lest the logs should jump the chute, as they had often done before, killing or maiming the unhappy man that came too near. For was not little ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... make them; and it would almost seem that women are the chief inspiration of this mob. The draft may have been its inciting cause, but it has degenerated into an insatiable thirst for violence, blood, and plunder. I saw an Irishwoman to-day who fought like a wild-cat before she would give up her ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... attack the problem, for few persons of that day had much faith in the undertaking. In place of help, ridicule cropped up from many sources. It was absurd, the public said, to expect such a wild-cat scheme to succeed. Why, over six hundred miles of the area to be covered did not contain a tree and in consequence there would be nothing from which to make cross-ties. And where was the workmen's food to come from if they were plunged into a wilderness beyond the reach of civilization? ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... gone far before he met the wild-cat. "Good morning, friend," says Cock-alu, "and where may you be ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... hunt the Indian carried his bow strung ready for use, and his bundle of assorted arrows in a quiver made of the skin of a small fox, wild-cat or fisher, hung conveniently ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... some of the sinews and all the irritability of a stout Champenoise peasant, roused by his insults to the aristocracy, one of whom she probably regarded herself, from having lived so long under their roof, watched her opportunity, made a spring at him like a wild-cat, wrested the sabre from his hand, and, grasping the struggling and screaming little functionary in her strong arms, carried him like a child out ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... bruised and bleeding, scarcely able to walk—for such fights were wild-cat fights with claws and teeth. He bided his time; he grew rapidly, and by April, 1771, being six feet tall at last (the true border height) and strongly muscled, he challenged ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... it; and in the wild woods, especially in cold countries, where the squirrels are most plentiful, there are many enemies—pine-martens, which climb trees and spring from branch to branch almost as nimbly as the poor little squirrel they persecute, and the terrible wild-cat, which seeks its unsuspecting prey by night, or in the twilight, when the squirrels are gambolling merrily among the leafy branches before cuddling to sleep in their little nests. With sly caution the wild-cat creeps noiselessly ...
— Harper's Young People, January 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Yesterday, a wild-cat was shot and brought into camp by one of the 3d Ohio boys. He was about three feet in length, and a "varmint" I shouldn't like to meet on ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... life, with such a wife, were strange! But if you have a stomach, to't i' God's name; You shall have me assisting you in all. But will you woo this wild-cat? ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... mine-telephone to warn the men themselves. And here was the camp-marshal driving them back. Hal and Mary arrived in time to see Mrs. David, whose husband was at work in Number Two, shaking her fist in the marshal's face and screaming at him like a wild-cat. He drew his revolver upon her; and at this Hal started forward. A blind fury seized him—he would have ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... moment of victory, found himself attacked in the rear. One of the smaller boys, who had gone out with the rest, hearing the fight, had rushed back, and, just as Keith drove Jake Dennison to his seat, sprang on him like a little wild-cat. Turning, ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... went so far as to have an expert mineralogist come over here to examine the stones. This man was out west on business for Tom Latimer's father, and Tom said it would cost next to nothing to send for him. The man said the jewels would create the greatest wild-cat speculations in New York if they were placed on the market. ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the vasty deep. A fortune in one hundred days. Our dredger will work three thousand yards of sand in heavy surf at Cape Nome. It will take out twenty-four thousand dollars in a day. You can make more money with us than by taking flyers in wild-cat oil schemes, etc." The poster was illustrated by a huge machine gotten up on the centipede plan; at least, it resembled that hated insect from having attached to its frame two sets of wheels of different sizes along the sides like the legs of a centipede, but with a ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... alas! were bare. Her progress was majestic, for were not her ancestors hidalgos of Aragon? Three steps she made across the velvety grass, and set her aristocratic sole upon a bunch of Johnny's burrs. Dona Maria Castillas y Buenventura de las Casas emitted a yowl even as a wild-cat. Turning about, she fell upon hands and knees, and crawled—ay, like a beast of the field she crawled back to ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... to take her hand, but his touch roused her from her lethargy; and springing at him, like a wild-cat, she gave him a blow in the face that made him stagger,—so powerful was it, in the vehemence of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... cedar-birds gathering in flocks for their southward flight, the muskrats making their houses ready for the winter, and the porcupines dumbly meditating and masticating among the branches of the young poplar-trees. We also had a delightful interview with a wild-cat, and almost a ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... nature by mental microbes, or walked on by ambitious doodle-bugs, who wondered next day to learn that you were absorbing your rations with clock-work regularity and doing business at the same old stand. I once saw an egotistical brindle-pup joyfully bestride the collar of an adult wild-cat, and the woeful result convinced me that Ambition and Judgment should blithely foot it hand in hand. That is why, my dear Colonel, I approach you by siege and parallel, instead of capering gayly down your right-o'-way like a youthful William ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the happy slave-voices used to sing "Monkey Motions," and the merry feet used to dance to "Cotton-eyed Joe," weeds and thick underbrush have all grown up, and partridges build their nests there; and sometimes, at dusk, a wild-cat or a fox may be seen stealing ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... along-side, to support the chicken coop he was wheeling. Norman's face shone with importance, and he called excitedly as he fumbled at the gate latch, "Look, Mary! You can't guess what we've got in this box! A young wild-cat! Lupe wants to ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... indeed came; but when he saw them all as frightened as rabbits before the wild-cat, he laughed aloud and forgave them, for he was noble and generous. And as they were hungry—for he had come in hard times—he gave them much venison, and sorrow departed from their wigwams. But as they had left him of old, he now left ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... horse was a thing that kicked or bit or showed the whites of his eyes and set his ears back and switched his tail and gave other evidences of depraved moral nature, and she would no more touch or approach one than she would a wild-cat, except when in so doing, with an admiring audience, she could become the central figure in an effective tableau. Ray wished her in Jericho, as she stood at arm's length and touched Dandy with the tips of her dainty fingers and began to speak of him as "it." Equine ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... has met my boy?"—turning on her sharply. "No, that's silly,"—the sad vagueness coming back into the faded eyes. After a pause,—"Derrick, thee said? He was short, the lad was,—but with legs and arms as tender and supple as a wild-cat's. I loss much of my strength when he was born; it was wonderful, for a woman, before; I giv it to him. I'm glad of that! I thank God that I giv it to him!"—her voice sinking, and growing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... clustered so thickly about him that he no longer had room in which to swing his arms. The horse performed some wonderful kicking and even Eureka assisted when she leaped bodily upon the Gargoyles and scratched and bit at them like a wild-cat. ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... kept for the possible appearance of an enemy, either two-footed or four-footed. But no man came to disturb them, and if any wild beasts were near they kept well out of sight. Once Lukins brought down a small wild-cat, ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... we spend on education be used to found fellowships of creative poetry? These would not be given at first to those who wish to learn to write poetry; for the first thousands would be far too precious for use in any such wild-cat speculations. They would be devoted, rather, to poets of proved quality, who have already, somehow, learned their art, and who ask no more wondrous boon from life than fresh air and time to regain and keep that necessary margin of vitality ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... the green before Wood-grey's door (for that was the name of the dead goodman), and they were saying that they would not bury such accursed folk, but would bear them a little way so that they should not be vexed with the stink of them, and cast them into the thicket for the wolf and the wild-cat and the stoat to deal with; and they should lie there, weapons and silver and all; and they deemed it base to strip such wretches, for who would wear their raiment or bear ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... more familiarly than favorably known in financial circles of Boston, as the man who had put afloat more wild-cat stocks than any other speculator on the street. It might be supposed that his connection with any scheme would be enough to wreck its prospects, yet whatever he took hold of floated for a time. There was always a feeling among his victims that ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... moment the man's face expressed the rage of a wild-cat and his hands clinched. "Don't you do it—that's all!" he finally ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... fasting, or feasting, or drunkenness, and that fetich he carries with him to bring good luck, in love or in combat, in the hunt or on the journey. He carries a fetich suspended to his neck, he ties a fetich to his bow, he buries a fetich under his tent, he places a fetich under his pillow of wild-cat skins, he prays to his fetich, he praises it, or chides it; if successful, his fetich receives glory; if he fail, his fetich is disgraced. These fetiches may be fragments of bone or shell, the tips of the tails of animals, the claws of birds or beasts, perhaps dried ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... moment all eyes were directed towards a man engaged in a fierce struggle with a horse. The animal was a beautiful chestnut mare with slender limbs, glossy coat, and superb form. Good as she was to look upon, she was just then exhibiting the spirit of a wild-cat or anything else that is most savage and untamable, and was attempting, with desperate struggles, to throw and kill the man who rode her. He was our recent acquaintance, Silas Pine, bronco-buster from the Bad Lands, who, with ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... that "touch of nature which makes the whole world kin," and kept a bright look-out to his rear as well as in his front, so that when Bladud, despite his care, trod on a dry stick the boy heard it. Next moment he was off, and a moment after that he was seen bounding down the hill like a wild-cat. ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... Mills in a hectoring tone, "and I will soon explain why. You lost a large sum in South Africans, but won it back again in Americans. You then again, and again contrary to my advice, embarked in perfect wild-cat affairs, which ended in our—I say 'our' here—getting severely scratched and mauled. Altogether you have frittered away L30,000, and have placed the remaining ten in a venture which to my mind is as wild as all the rest of your unfortunate ventures. These speculations have, almost without exception, ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... thee. For this moreover I will tell thee, that I have seen nought in field or woodland that is as lovely to me as thou art; nay, not the fritillary nodding at our brook's mouth, nor the willow-boughs waving on Green Eyot; nor the wild-cat sporting on the little woodlawn, when she saw me not; nor the white doe rising up from the grass to look to her fawn; nor aught that moves and grows. Yet there is another thing which I must tell thee, to wit, that what thou hast said about the fashion of any part of me, that same, setting aside ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... yet. I'm just going to sit back and have some fun watching you defend that little old twenty-thousand dollars I just gave you. Do you know, Matt, that I never knew a man to save up a thousand dollars, by denying himself many things, that he didn't invest the thousand in a wild-cat mine or a dry oil well? Ah, Matt, it's those first few dollars that come so hard and go so easy that break most men's hearts; but here you are with twenty thousand that came so easy I've just naturally got to see how hard they go! You'll be worth more money to me, Matt, and ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... was a grey-headed man, slack in the twist but limber in the joints—distinguished by a constant lowering of the eye and a spasmodic twitching of the corners of the mouth. He was active and nimble, and in moments of excitement much given to spitting Gaelic oaths like a wild-cat. But, spite his half-century of life, he was still the best and the most daring man of a company who had taken ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... find many bears, I'm afraid; but you would have to take a gun, and you might possibly find a wild-cat or two. Who is there ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... would succeed; but gradually one industry after another got a foothold. Then the panic of 1872 demonstrated that a man who has money must invest it where he can watch it, instead of trusting to luck in some wild-cat railroad scheme out West. By the concentration and investment at home of some of the money saved from the wreck, the Wamsutta mills have become a corporation with a capital of three million dollars. ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... "and I think he still is. But," she added, glancing at Reddy under her light fringed lids, "you—you're regularly reformed, aren't you? You're stouter, too, and altogether more solid and commercial looking. Yet who'd have thought of your keeping a hotel or ever doing anything but speculate in wild-cat or play at draw poker. How did you drift into it? Come, tell me! I'm not Mrs. Sylvester just yet, and maybe I might like to go into the business too. You don't want a partner, ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... charming. Her family, like mine, had become more or less decayed about the time I enlisted, but fortunately her mother had a quarter section of land down in Ventura County and when a wild-cat oil operator on adjacent land brought in a splendid well, Senora Sepulvida was enabled to dispose of her land at a thousand dollars an acre and a royalty of one-eighth on all of the oil produced. The first well drilled was a success and ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... the river comes in the whole country will go to smash; and with the class of structures they have put in to control it and with an eastern engineer in charge, it's too big a chance. The S. & C. is not spending money to help out wild-cat projects ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... strange suspicions of mortgages, and dealings with Jews. He has actually inklings of horrid post-obits; and groans as he looks on his old oaks, as he rides through his woods and parks, foreseeing their overthrow; nay, he fancies he sees the land-agent among his quiet old farmers, like a wild-cat in a rabbit warren, startling them out of their long dream of ease and safety, with news of doubled rents, and notices to quit, to make way for threshing-machines, winnowing-machines, corn-crushers, patent ploughs, scufflers, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... newspapers and cigars from us. On the mountain ash the bright red berries dangled in clumps like Christmas bells, and some of the leaves of the elm still clung to their boughs; so that the wide yellow road was dappled like a wild-cat's back with black splotches of shadow. Only when we curved through some village that had been the scene of a skirmish or a reprisal did the roofless shells and the toppled walls of the houses, standing gaunt and ugly in the sharp sunlight, make us realize that we ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... continued stopping at public houses until my means were about gone. When I got to the Black Swamp in the county of Wood, Ohio, I stopped one night at a hotel, after travelling all day through mud and snow; but I soon found that I should not be able to pay my bill. This was about the time that the "wild-cat banks" were in a flourishing state, and "shin plasters"[3] in abundance; they would charge a dollar for one ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... the buffalo, which have not crossed the Wahsatch Range into the Great Basin, within the recollection of the oldest trapper. The only wild animals common in the country of the Utahs are the hare, or "jackass-rabbit," the wild-cat, the wolf, and the grizzly bear. There are few antelope or elk. Trout abound in the mountain-brooks and in Lake Utah. In the Salt Lake, as in the Dead Sea, there are no fish. Before the advent of the Mormons, the habits ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... transformed into a veritable little wild-cat. His hat had flown from his head, his curly hair clung round his fine, deathly pale face, out of which his eyes fairly burned; the portfolio with all its contents was lying on the ground—over cap, portfolio and all he went for the anatomy ...
— Good Blood • Ernst Von Wildenbruch
... neat cabin, with its decorated walls, and squirrel and wild-cat skins, was duly admired, the luncheon-basket of the Saunders party was re-enforced by provisions from Rand's larder, and spread upon the ledge; the dimensions of the cabin not admitting four. Under the potent influence of ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... happen so close together. And she had reason to be glad she went, seeing that her bankers received her with perfect cordiality, and convinced her that she would certainly lose all her money if she insisted on investing it in any such wild-cat scheme as the one she had set her heart upon. They suggested, instead, certain foreign bonds on which she would receive a perfectly safe four-and-a-half per cent.; and so pleased was she at having been preserved from risking ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... for lack of game," declared Walter, "in the last half mile, I have seen coons, possums, deer, and a wild-cat, to say nothing of the thousands ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... his hot brow; for, woman-like, she laid her hand like down on that burning brow to aid her words in soothing it. Nor did it occur to him just then that this admonition, delivered with a kind maternal hand, maternal voice, came from the same young lady who had flown at him like a wild-cat with this very problem in her mouth. She mesmerized him, problem and all; he subsided into a complacent languor, and at last went to sleep, thinking only of her. But the topic had entered his mind too deeply ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... done? Well, now, I'll tell you what he's done, Persis, since you think Rogers is such a saint, and that I used him so badly in getting him out of the business. He's been dabbling in every sort of fool thing you can lay your tongue to,—wild-cat stocks, patent-rights, land speculations, oil claims,—till he's run through about everything. But he did have a big milling property out on the line of the P. Y. & X.,—saw-mills and grist-mills and lands,—and for ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... is a beast about three feet long, with a short stubbed tail, and might easily be mistaken for a large wild-cat. Its fur, which is short and very thick, and of a beautiful silver gray, is much used for muffs, tippets, and fur trimming. The lynx is a cowardly beast, and seldom attacks anything larger than hares, squirrels, and birds. It will sometimes rob a sheep-fold, as the gentle and pretty lambs have no ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the weapon out of the belt of the dead man, and wheeled round. The porter from the wicket was running on them sword in hand. Foy forgot that he was wounded—for the moment his leg seemed sound again. He doubled himself up and sprang at the man like a wild-cat, as one springs who has the rack behind him. There was no fight, yet in that thrust the skill which Martin had taught him so patiently served him well, for the sword of the Spaniard passed over his head, whereas Foy's long dagger went through the porter's throat. A glance showed Foy that ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... But while writing of him, to third parties, sometimes almost simultaneously, the contrast of styles is not a little startling; and the beautiful affectionately chirping Mouse is seen suddenly to be an injured Wild-cat with its fur up. All readers of Voltaire are aware of this; and how Voltaire handles his "LUC" (mysterious nickname for KING FRIEDRICH ), when Luc's back is turned. For alas, there is no man or thing ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... had, which was two, and he flung them down; she offered him half a paper of pins, worth forty ravens, and he made a mouth at her and jabbed one of them in the raven's back. That was the limit, you know. It called for the other twin. Her eyes blazed up, and she jumped for him like a wild-cat, and when she was done with him she was rags and he wasn't anything but an allegory. That was most undoubtedly the other twin, you see, coming to the front. No, sir; don't tell ME he ain't in there. I've seen him with my own eyes—and plenty ...
— A Horse's Tale • Mark Twain
... on the ground immediately beside the spring, crouched a large wild-cat, the hairy tips of her ears twitching nervously. Under her claws was a rabbit, evidently just caught, into which the wild-cat had just sunk her teeth when the approach of the boy was heard. At first Wilbur could not understand why she had not sprung into the woods with her ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive slave has his concealed hut; O the strange fascination of these half-known, half-impassable swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the wild-cat, and the whirr of the rattlesnake; The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon—singing through the moon-lit night, The humming-bird, the wild-turkey, the raccoon, the opossum; A Tennessee corn-field—the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... Iroquois crept close to the palisade, where they lay motionless till near dawn. By this time the last song had died away, and the tired singers had left their posts or fallen asleep. One of the Iroquois, with the silence and agility of a wild-cat, climbed to the top of a watch-tower, where he found two slumbering Hurons, brained one of them with his hatchet, and threw the other down to his comrade, who quickly despoiled him of his life and his scalp. Then, with the reeking trophies of their exploit, the adventurers ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... I stood now feeling like a fool. I'd grown gray in the work, and here in my prosperous middle life, a boy's whim and a girl's pretty face had put me in the position of consulting a clairvoyant. Worse, for this was a wild-cat affair, without even the professional standing of establishments to which I knew some of the weak brothers in my line sometimes sneaked for ghostly counsel. If it should leak out, I was ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... yelled around their victim. But what he could not do another and a weaker did—even the little porter. Furiously—no one knew how or whence—he burst up as if from the ground in the thickest of the crowd, with knife, teeth, and nails, like a venomous wild-cat, tearing his way towards his idol. Alas! he was torn down himself, rolled over the steps, and lay there half dead in an agony of weeping, as Philammon sprang up past ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... sprawling monster trying to swim. Recovering somewhat from his fright, he began to bark at the creature, and ran round and round his milk-pan, wouf-woufing, gurring, growling, like an old dog barking at a wild-cat or a bear. The natural astonishment and curiosity of that boy dog getting his first entomological lesson in this wonderful world was so immoderately funny that I had great difficulty in ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... him, fighting her way out to where the Very Young Man lay. In a moment she was beside him. Her fragile body seemed hopelessly inadequate for such a struggle, but the spirit within her made her fight like a wild-cat. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... in their ears all night, And the sturgeon splashed, and the wild-cat screamed, And they did not wake till the morning light Red ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... I, 'Longacre ain't got so much on them dames!' An' at that one o' them wore a wild-cat's skin an' that's all—an' a wild-cat ain't big. And t'other she ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... slip away like that, you little wild-cat!" she cried, beginning to pant slightly. In the white light of the electric candelabra, which made the corridor bright as day, I saw her beautiful bosom heave under its double rope of creamy pearls. All the charming ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... in Babylonia appear to be chiefly the following:—the lion, the leopard, the hyeena, the lynx, the wild-cat, the wolf, the jackal, the wild-boar, the buffalo, the stag, the gazelle, the jerboa, the fox, the hare, the badger, and the porcupine. The Mesopotamian lion is a noble animal. Taller and larger than a Mount St. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... merit in the claims of the seeker. The business enterprise must present no appearance of hazard or mere adventure; for the mere matter of sameness of race does not warrant one in taking risks as a partner or patron in "wild-cat schemes." No man should expect or receive patronage solely because he is black; for your patron, besides generally being poor, is also black, and might as justly look for favors of you upon that score as you of him. The business, let us say of ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... influx of population to our settlement came adventurers of all classes; desperadoes, gamblers, broken down professional men, nymphs du pave of the coarse and vulgar sort, gentlemen who "had interests" in "wild-cat" mines in half the counties of the Pacific States, greasers, or Mexicans, Indians (pueblas)—in short, a conglomerate mass of humanity; or, judging by later events, one might rather say inhumanity—such as is nowhere to be seen but in the mining towns of the far West. Under the ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... provisional courts of justice and sword-revised soviets of the people so that packed soviets and Lenine-picked delegates and Trotsky-ridden ministers made the actual soviet government as much resemble the ideal soviet government as a wild-cat mining stock board of directors resembles a municipal board of public works. And the world knows now, if it did not in 1918-19, that the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic was, and is, a highly centralized tyranny, frankly called ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... now in a position to break this assailant's neck. Bones snapped as he applied the terrific muscles of his right arm and the brown man's muscles relaxed. Johnny's head and arms were free. With the speed of a wild-cat, he sprang to his feet, faced about, then, with a bounding leap, cleared the remaining assailant and went tobogganing down the hill. He had seen five others of the brown villains approaching. He had had enough for this night—more ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... half-fierce, half-terrified, and wholly flushed. She had her hand wrapped up in a 'kerchief already stained with blood; and from this I gathered that the king in his frenzy had wounded her slightly. Standing before her mistress, with her hair bristling, like a wild-cat's fur, and her arms akimbo, was Fanchette, her harsh face and square form instinct with fury and defiance. Madame de Bruhl and Simon cowered against the wall not far from them; and in a chair, into which he had apparently just thrown himself, sat the ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... upon them. Once Nam tried to draw his knife, but failing in his attempt he submitted without further struggle. With Soa it was different. She bit and tore like a wild-cat, and Juanna saw that she was striving to reach the panel ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... no Ormond, I like to find out why, and I love to dispute the Ormond claim which Walter Butler makes—he with his dark face and hair, and those dusky, golden eyes of his, which turn so yellow when I plague him—the mad wild-cat that he is." ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... cried, "to th' untill'd earth, Let her joy in a mighty birth,— Night from the land has pass'd away, The desert basks in noon of day. Joy, to the sullen wilderness, I come, her gloomy shades to bless, To bid the bear and wild-cat yield Their savage haunts to town and field. Joy, to stout hearts and willing hands, That win a right to these broad lands, And reap the fruit of honest toil, Lords of the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... young Crusoes were living on the Rice Lake Plains, were plentiful, and, of course, so were those beasts that prey upon them,—wolves, bears, and wolverines, besides the Canadian lynx, or catamount, as it is here commonly called, a species of wild-cat or panther. These wild animals are now no longer to be seen; it is a rare thing to hear of bears or wolves, and the wolverine and lynx are known only as matters of history in this part of the country; these animals disappear as civilization advances, while some others increase and follow ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... having clothes made special without pockets but being searched to the hide every night like them poor unfortunate Zulus that toil in the diamond mines of Africa. Of course I could see then that this boy had become merely enraged like a wild-cat at having a dollar crowded onto him for some one else every time a head waiter grovelled Angus ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... current among us. Almost the only cheerful reminiscence in connection with the place which arises in my mind is that of a battle I had with one of my classmates, who had bullied me until I could stand it no longer. I was a very slight lad, but there was a wild-cat element in me which, when roused, made up for lack of weight, and I licked my adversary effectually. However, one of my first experiences of the extremely rough-and-ready nature of justice, as exhibited by the ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... belonging to other totems may be borrowed and deposited for a time with them. For example, a sacred store-house of the honey-ant totem was found to contain sixty-eight birth-sticks of that totem with a few of the lizard totem and two of the wild-cat totem.[126] Any store-house will usually contain both sticks and stones, but as a rule perhaps the sticks predominate in number.[127] Time after time these tribal repositories are visited by the men ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... just like a wild-cat," cried her aunt. "I never saw such a girl. But now be sensible, come and sit down beside me. Will you come or not? I'll never say another kind word to you as long as I live if you won't sit down here ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... beavers—we caught them in deadfalls and in steel traps. The mink we usually took in deadfalls, smaller, of course, than the ones we used for the bears. The musk-rat we caught in box traps like a mouse trap. The wild-cat we ran ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... by them fighting and crowding for places against the warm walls and chimney-corners. If he had had opened his door and crept back into bed, he might soon have had a buffalo on one side of his fireplace and a bear on the other, with a wild-cat asleep on the hearth between, and with the thin-skinned deer left shivering outside as truly as if they ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... trophies of the fight or chase: A target there, a bugle here, A battle-axe, a hunting-spear, And broadswords, bows, and arrows store, With the tusked trophies of the boar. Here grins the wolf as when he died, And there the wild-cat's brindled hide The frontlet of the elk adorns, Or mantles o'er the bison's horns; Pennons and flags defaced and stained, That blackening streaks of blood retained, And deer-skins, dappled, dun, and white, With otter's fur and seal's unite, In ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... money. Clark had left the fifty thousand for the boy with the idea that Henry should start him in business with it. But he only turned up wild-cat schemes that Henry would not listen to. He did not know how Henry got the money, or from where. He thought for a long time that Henry had ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... significance defined and understood entirely in terms of human nature. Human nature—not animal nature—is to be the basis and guide of Human Engineering. Thus based and guided, Human Engineering will eliminate "wild-cat schemers," gamblers and "politicians." It will put an end to industrial violence, strikes, insurrections, war ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... what wild-cat schemes were often evolved by that tireless brain, he cautiously replied, "'Yes' is an easy word to speak, girlies, but sometimes 'no' is wisest, even if it is hard ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... shrewd young friend in New York, named Amasa Munn. Through this man, O'Hara began to speculate in every wild-cat scheme that squalled aloud for public support; and between Munn and the wild-cats his little fortune spread its wings of gold and soared away, leaving him a wreck on ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... maintain troops for defence against the French and the Indians; and the legislatures were apt to be short-sighted and unreasonably stingy about such matters. Again, the people were sometimes seized with a silly craze for "paper money" and "wild-cat banks"—devices for making money out of nothing—and sometimes the governors were sensible enough to oppose such delusions but not altogether sensible in their manner of doing it. Thus in 1740 there was fierce excitement ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... shouting went Where o'er the vales the branches bent; The wild-cat we chased from the glens, that the cheer And cries of our hunting might fall on ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell |
