with it it could bring; houses, bahns,
chicken coops and a plentiful sprinklin' of human bein's, to liven up
things a little. A cyclone ain't very particular, any more than a
peccary. It snatches up anything that comes handy. Sometimes it picks
up a few knives and whacks things with them as it goes along. You know
that, don't you, Cyclona?"

Cyclona nodded. She always lingered at the fireside to hear this story
of the flying peccary which was her favorite as well as the child's.

"It brought me," she said.

The boy raised himself in Seth's arms.

"Maybe you are my sister!" he cried.

"Maybe I am," smiled Cyclona.

"At that theah Towanda cyclone," recommenced Seth, "that little Kansas
town the cyclone got mad at and made way with, theah must have been a
hundred knives or mo' flyin' around loose. They cut hogs half in two.
You would have thought a butchah had done it. And the chickens were
carved ready to be put on the table. It was wonderful the things that
cyclone did."

"And the peccaries," Charlie reminded him.

"That cyclone," began Seth all over again, "came flyin' along black as
night and thunderin' laik mad and caught up the whole herd of
peccaries.

"Those peccaries ain't even-tempahd animals.

"They've got tempahs laik greased lightnin'. It made them firin' mad
fo' a cyclone to take such liberties with them, and they got up and
slammed back at it right and left. Well, they didn't do a thing to
that cyclone. In the first place the whole herd of peccaries began to
snap and grunt laik fury till the noise of the cyclone simmahd down
into a sort of pitiful whine, laik the whine of a whipped dog. Imagine
a cyclone comin' to that! Then, they tell me, you couldn't heah
anything but the squealin' and gruntin' of those pesky little
peccaries.

"Between squeals they bit into that theah cyclone fo' all it was wuth,
takin' great chunks out of it, swallowin' lightnin' and eatin' big
mouthfuls of thundah just as if they laiked it. All the stuff the
cyclone was bringin' along with it wa'n't anything to them. They
swallowed it whole and pretty soon, you'd hahdly believe it, but theah
wa'n't anything lef' of that cyclone at all.

"They had eaten up ever' single bit of it except a tiny breeze they
had fohgotten that died away mournful laik across the prairies,
sighin' becawse it had stahted out so brash and come to such a sudden
untimely and unexpected end.

"Then, theah was the herd of peccaries about five mile