“Sounds like the beginning of a sandstorm to me,” he murmured to himself. “I’d better wake John, so we can all turn out and look after the horses.”
He crawled out of his bag and punched Big John awake. The keen wind blew steady and strong, chilling him to the bone, while blown sand gritted in his teeth. It did not take the big plainsman more than one sniff to bounce out of his mess of blankets, wide awake.
“Shore it’s a reg’lar night-bloomin’ swozzle a-comin’, Sid! Let Scotty lie. We’ll git the hosses in under the shelter of the buttes.”
Out in the cold gloom they found the animals, standing patiently with their sides to the wind. Pulling up their picket pins, they herded them into a sort of shelf where a great rock wall jutted out in a weird, wind-scoured formation, like a vast top on end.
“She’s goin’ to hum fit to blow the shingles off a barn, pronto, an’ we’ll all be buried in sand,” said Big John cheerfully. “You an’ I gotta rig a tarp up here in these rocks, old-timer, before we hits the hay ag’in.”
Sid was shivering like a leaf. He ran for his saddle roll and slipped on the fleece-lined coat, glad of its shelter. Then they unrolled the tarp, fighting it in the wind and the dark like some wild thing, until it was finally anchored and rose at a steep slant like a sort of bear den. Under it they laid their sleeping rigs and then picked up Scotty, bag and all, and carried him over. Aside from a sleepy grunt or two, he slept right through it! The dogs were glad enough to follow them in and curl up again, backed up against the sleeping bags.
“You remember how we batted the snow off the rag house walls up in Montana, Sid?” queried Big John as he crawled into his bag again. “Waal, same stunt here. Reach up an arm an’ hit her a good poke when she sags too much. There won’t be nawthin’ but sand hyarabouts, come morning.”
They dozed off to sleep. Sid awoke before dawn with a sense of some great body pressing down on him. A howling tempest was raging down the gulch; sand in sheets and clouds swirled by. Overhead the tarp sagged down on them all, and, pushing up on it, he found it immovable. His exertions wakened Big John and incidentally jammed an elbow into Scotty’s face so that that exemplary sleeper arose, spluttering and spitting sand out of his mouth.
“Wh—wha—what’s happenin’?” he mumbled. “I dreamed the Grand Canyon had caved in on me——”
“Sho’ has! Turn out an’ shove, old settler,” grunted Big John as the three put their shoulders to it. There seemed to be a ton of sand on that roof, and it would not slide off in the docile way that snow did. It lay heavy and inert, to sag back again as soon as a shoulder was withdrawn.