“Then I seen what had happened, I’d tied the hoss on top of a sand-dune. The wind had come up and the sand had blowed away. What I calculated on bein’ a bush was in fact a great big tree—so dang big in fact, that the thirty-foot lariat wouldn’t let pore Brown Jug more than half way to the ground. If I hadn’t woke up jest when I did, the pore brute would of choked to death shore.”
“How did you get him down?” asked Lanky.
“Oh, that was easy,” said Joe. “In them days I always had my old six-gun by me, and I jest whipped her out and put a bullet through the rope and let Brown Jug down. The fall didn’t seem to hurt him none, and after he blowed a little while, he was as pert as ever.
“However, the wind got up again in the middle of the mornin’, and the only way I could keep the hoss on the ground was to tie big rocks to the horn of the saddle.”
“That shows you’ve got more sense than a prairie-dog,” said Hank, “which surprises me. Many a time on the South Plains durin’ a sandstorm, I’ve seen them critters ten feet in the air, diggin’ with all their might, tryin’ to git back in their holes.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve seen,” said Red, “and it was the funniest sight I ever saw caused by a sandstorm. One day in the spring the boss sent me out to pizen prairie-dogs. He was one man I didn’t work for long; he jist couldn’t stand to see a man not doin’ somethin’. So when the wind would git bad and he didn’t want to go out his self, he would send us out to ride fence and pizen dogs and the like.
“Well, this time I rode over to where I knowed there was a big town, and I rode up, and what do you suppose I saw? The sand was all blowed away, and there was them holes stickin’ forty feet in the air. I never knowed before that time how crooked them critters made their residences.”
“The wind’s purty hard on the rodents sometimes,” said Hank. “I knowed a wind, however, that helped out a pore human down on Sulphur Draw that was about to starve. This feller had come in to farm, and he raised a cribful of corn, but the ranchers wouldn’t buy it because it wasn’t shelled, and wouldn’t go in a morral. So the pore farmer was about to starve, and his old lady and kids to boot.
“This feller was jest fresh from the sticks and didn’t have much confidence in anybody, anyway, and he ’lowed the ranchers was waitin’ for a chance to steal his corn. So he nailed up the crib door good and tight. He noticed a knothole in one of the walls, but he saw it was too little for an ear of corn to go through; so he jest let that go.
“One day a wind come up, and the farmer and his folks hid in the dugout like prairie-dogs, and the next day the wind laid, and they crawled out and looked around; and there was corn cobs scattered all alongside the crib. The old man thought shore somebody had stole his corn, but when he got the crib door open, he saw it there all shelled as purty as if he’d done it his self.