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H urry!” Beulah yelled at Lily and Daisy when they were still quite a ways from the church. “There’s a big storm on the way. Look out at the west sky!”

Lily glanced over her shoulder to see a cloud of red dust coming right at them. It was even bigger than the ones she had seen out in West Texas.

“What is that?” Daisy asked.

“We’re about to get hit with a dust storm, and we don’t have much time,” Lily answered. “I figured the snakes were restless because rain was on the way, not a dust storm.”

Beulah stepped off the porch and shouted above the roar.

“Go get your bedding and bring it to the sanctuary. The barn ladies will be staying in the church tonight. We’ll be crowded, but we’ll make do.

The cooks will stay in whichever house they work in.

We don’t know how long it will last or how hard it will hit us. ”

Lily picked up the pace, and somehow Daisy kept up with her.

They passed dozens of women running down the path from the barn to the church.

Most of them had bundles in their arms and children tearing along beside them.

Lily looked over her shoulder, and the giant wall of red dirt coming at them like a mile-wide tornado seemed to be picking up speed.

It looked like a hard rain falling down from the sky, only it wasn’t water.

It was sand and dirt and whatever else a severe wind could pick up and throw at them.

If anyone was caught outside, it could easily strip the outer layer of skin right off their bodies.

“Rattlesnakes and now a sandstorm,” Daisy yelled and ran into the barn.

Lily could hardly hear her over the growing sounds of the wind already whistling through the trees. “A hard rain right now would be wonderful. Mud balls like we saw in town would be better than what’s about to happen. We need to work fast. I can already smell the dust.”

“We can’t let the horses stay out in this!” Daisy screamed. “We have got to bring them into the barn.”

After all Beulah had done for them, Lily owed it to her to take care of the horses before she and Daisy made a mad dash back to the church. The big wooden doors leading out into the corral were stuck, and the hard wind beating against them didn’t help.

“Give it all you’ve got!” Daisy shouted.

Lily pushed so hard that she thought for sure her arms would fall off at the shoulder, but the door squeaked and finally gave way.

She grabbed the bridle on one horse, but its eyeballs rolled back, and it reared up on its hind legs.

Her muscles ached from pushing on the doors so hard, and she dropped the reins.

The dust got thicker and thicker, but she finally got a grip on the reins again and tugged hard.

“Okay, pretty baby,” she yelled. “You have to come in the barn or die. This is just the beginning of the storm. When the worst of it arrives, you won’t have a chance, so come in like a good girl. In another minute or two, I won’t be able to see through all this well enough to get you inside.”

“I’ve got this one headed in the right direction,” Daisy shouted. “Follow me.”

“I’m trying!” Lily yelled.

As if the animal understood that safety was inside the barn, it bolted.

Lily felt like all nearly six feet of her was waving in the wind like a frayed flag.

Then the horse stopped dead, and she landed on the floor in a heap.

Daisy ran past her and single-handedly closed the door and then slid down the back side.

“Holy hell!” she swore.

“Amen!” Lily gasped.

“Are you all right? Is anything broken?”

“Doesn’t seem to be,” Lily said between bouts of sucking in air. “But it knocked the wind right out of me. What do we do now?”

“We’ll put them in stalls after we can get our legs to work again,” Daisy answered. “There’s no way we can get to the church in this. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Have you?”

Lily leaned against a beam holding the roof up and coughed several times.

“We’ll have to camp out here until it all passes.

And yes, I have seen sandstorms, but that was out in the flat country, and what I saw was a baby compared to this thing.

I didn’t think one would ever hit here with all these trees. ”

The horse that she’d brought in began to move slowly across the barn toward the stalls at the far end.

Lily eased up on her knees and then her feet and got a firm grip on the bridle.

“I’m just helping you so your pretty coat doesn’t get blasted off your hide.

Easy, now.” She led the animal back to the first stall and used her free hand to open the gate.

“Just take a few steps back. See, there’s already hay in the trough, so you don’t have to go hungry today. ”

Daisy stood up and took a step toward the second horse, but it reared up on its hind feet and pawed at her. “I don’t think this critter likes me, even though I saved her life.”

Lily slowly approached the horse from the side and picked up the reins. “Now, you are going to behave or I’m going to throw you back out into that storm. I don’t have the energy to fight with you. Get in the stall and be good or die. It’s your choice.”

“At least they have hay, but their watering troughs only have an inch of water in the bottom,” Daisy said.

“I’d rather sink my nose down in that trough than into the pile of sand and dust outside.

That’s what we’d have to do if we take off in this mess toward the church.

It was already blowing so hard that I couldn’t even see the outhouse when we ran inside. ”

When she had the horse in the stall, Lily plopped down in front of the closed gate and put her head in her hands. “That was a close call, but we’re safe now.” She coughed even more between words. “I guess I sucked in some of the dirt.”

“Is there water in any of the pitchers?” Daisy asked. “I’m thirsty, too.”

“Yes, there’s at least one pitcher of water in here, and a tub full that Amanda hauled in this morning with intentions of giving Bea a bath tonight, but we’ll have to save part of that for the horses. But I’m not looking forward to living on a biscuit stuffed with eggs until this blows over.”

“You just got one?” Daisy sneezed.

“Two. I brought them with me after breakfast because I didn’t have time to eat a full plate, and I planned to come back and eat them after our shooting lessons,” she replied. “You don’t have to ask. You can have one of them.”

Daisy reached over and patted her on the shoulder. “Thank you.”

“We’d better both thank”—Lily pointed up toward the rafters in the barn—“someone higher than us that we at least found shelter before that thing hit. Why didn’t we see it coming?”

“We were down in a holler with trees all around us. This came from the west, where’s there’s nothing but lots of dirt,” Daisy answered. “It’s been a strange year, hasn’t it?”

“Yep, rain in July and now this. Think it will hit the sheep farm, or ranch—or whatever Matt and Claude call it?”

“I have no idea, but hopefully it doesn’t.” Daisy grinned all of a sudden.

“What’s so funny? Can’t I be worried about two guys who were kind to help us?” Lily’s tone was filled with irritation.

“This is another reason I asked about water.” Daisy pointed to her own face.

“Good Lord! I thought you meant only for drinking.” Lily touched her cheeks. “Do I look like you do?”

“I don’t have a mirror, but I would guess we look about alike. Since we’ll need water for drinking, we shouldn’t take a bath, but we could use some water to clean up a little.”

With the doors closed and the one window battened down, the temperature in the barn rose to an unbearable point by midafternoon.

Daisy stripped down to nothing but her undershirt and pantaloons.

She stretched out on her bed, which consisted of a quilt thrown over a bunch of loose hay, and kept her arms straight out and away from her body.

How Lily could ever sleep through the howling wind and the sound of dirt blasting against the walls of the barn was a total mystery. Daisy ignored her growling stomach and stared at the rafters above her.

“This is not going to kill me,” she reassured herself.

“No one ever died from hunger after only a day, and the storm will pass. I’ll be a sweaty mess when it does, but I’m made of sass and vinegar, not sugar and spice, and I can draw up a tankful of water and take a real bath tomorrow when the skies are clear again. ”

She turned her head toward Lily, half expecting her to wake up when she heard Daisy talking to herself, but no such luck.

Daisy focused on the ceiling and let her thoughts wander back to when she was married and how miserable she had been.

Maybe if she’d been like Sally Anne and had had lovers of her choosing, she might not have dreaded the nights so much.

Or maybe if her husband had had a thought about pleasing her instead of simply crawling on and off her body, things would have been better.

At least the men at the brothel didn’t smell like whiskey and stale sweat.

“Would it be different with someone like Claude?” she wondered in a low voice.

Lily muttered something that sounded like, “Oh, Matt!” Then her eyes popped open. She sat straight up and groaned. “If hell is seven times hotter than this, I don’t want to go.”

“Start praying,” Daisy said bluntly.

“You are in a mood,” Lily snapped.

“Yes, I am. I’m hungry, and we shouldn’t eat our biscuits until later so we can sleep tonight.

And it’s hot, and I’m sweating, and I couldn’t get all the dirt off, so it’s mixing with the sweat and making little balls of mud under my arms and in other places.

” She stopped long enough to catch her breath and then went on.

“And I don’t want to think about Claude or about how miserable I was in marriage, but I can’t help it. ”

“I was dreaming about eating one of those horses,” Lily said.

“Sounded to me like you were dreaming about Matt Maguire, like you might have been getting all sweaty for a far different reason than you are now,” Daisy teased.

“Daisy! Proper women don’t talk about bodily functions of any kind,” Lily scolded. “We don’t sweat—we dew up.”

“Proper lady or not, in this heat, I sweat!” Daisy declared.