"Why not?" Brownie inquired.
"Because—" said Tired Tim—"because the wind will blow every house away. It will snatch up the sticks of which the houses are built and carry them over the top of Blue Mountain. Then I guess you'll wish you had taken my advice and not built that new house of yours.
"I shall be safe enough," the lazy rascal continued. "All I'll have to do will be to crawl inside my house in the bank; for the wind can't very well blow the ground away."
Brownie Beaver thought that Tired Tim was just trying to scare him.
"I don't believe there's going to be any such thing!" he exclaimed.
"Don't you?" Tim grinned. "You just go and ask Grandaddy Beaver. He's the one that says there's going to be a cyclone."
At that Brownie Beaver stopped working and hurried off to find old
Grandaddy Beaver. And to his great dismay, Grandaddy said that what
Tired Tim had told him was the truth.
"It's a-coming!" Grandaddy Beaver declared. "I saw one once before in these parts, years before anybody else in this village was born. And when I see a cyclone a-coming I can generally tell it a long way off."
"When is it going to get here?" Brownie asked in a quavering voice.
"Next Tuesday!" Grandaddy replied.