Jake Coleman is a living description of a West Texas cowpoke, from his slow drawl to his scuffed-up $100 cowhide boots. He's spent most of his sixty years on the Bar-J Ranch, near a little one-horse town just west of Pecos, Texas,called Sand City. If dust and grit were water, the town would be in the middle of a big lake!

Trees are about as numerous as families; at last count, the number of ancestral clans in town was seventeen. Multiply that by six, and you've about figured the population. Of course, that's not counting the Bar-J Ranch, which covers a couple of sections, nearly surrounding Sand City. You can add another fifty yahoos they call 'ranch hands', living in bunk houses on the ranch. Jake Coleman is the oldest yahoo.

Definition of a "cowboy": cowhand, cowman, cowpoke, cowpuncher -- they all spell "ranch hand", and that spells HARD WORK!

Tending cattle spread out over two sections of nothing but sand, cactus, mesquite, tumbleweeds and rattlesnakes is more job than any leather-faced saddlebum wants.

There are no time-clocks to punch on the Bar-J, but you know it's time to crawl out of your saddle-blanket-covered lumpy mattress when the smell of steak, eggs, biscuits and red-eye gravy makes your nose start twitching about 4:30 every morning.

The kitchen and grubhouse are in one building about fifty yards from the bunk houses. Two long rough-cedar tables (no table cloths!) with benches on each side are loaded with big pans of the best breakfast chow west of the Mississippi.

Jake and company pretty well clean the tables in about ten minutes; now they are ready to face the sun and sand for the next sixteen hours.

Dawn today greets them with an unusual red cast in the eastern skies; not a good sign, Jake thought. He's seen this before -- the wind and sand will blow today for sure!

A barbed-wire fence is down in the southwest corner of section one. Jake and three other cowpokes have their day cut out for them!

The foursome saddled up, carrying two canteens of water, beef jerky and a roll of barbed-wire each, to repair the downed three-wire fence.

The ride to the southwest corner of the ranch would take them four hours, with a little luck; eight hours to make repairs, then four hours back to the ranch bunk house before sundown.

The ride was long, hot and hard on the backside. There is an arroyo near the downed fence, where they stopped to water the horses and wash some of the trail dust off themselves. It had only taken three-and-a-half hours so far.

They could all see where the fence was leaning over, completely on the ground. About twenty head of cattle had wandered through the downed section. Another hundred head of prime Bar-J beef were grazing on cactus and mesquite bushes within fifty yards of the break.

"You three boys go round up those strays, while I start repairing the fence", said Jake, who was in charge. He noticed a stillness in the air. The wind, which ALWAYS blows in West Texas, was now holding its breath.

It was then that Jake saw what he had seen so many times before: over the southwestern horizon, a brown arc appeared. Within a few minutes, the arc became a huge half-circle covering the horizon from west to east, then directly above them, containing tons and tons of reddish-brown West Texas topsoil.

The wind went from zero to sixty miles per hour in about ten seconds -- dry, choking DUST filled their eyes and throats!