A TEXAS DELIVERANCE

At the precise center of Roby, Texas, on one of the town's more expensive pieces of real estate, is a crudely made sign: good used clothes 10 cents to $1. It sits in front of a faded little store and tells you everything you need to know about the economics of this dying cotton-and-cattle town. The average house here costs $30,000. The average income is barely $20,000. Everywhere buildings are boarded up, abandoned, sinking in the rust-red dirt. The population is 616 and dwindling.

The town needed a miracle. And over Thanksgiving weekend it got one. With a mixture of shock and gratitude, Roby residents learned that 39 of their own had won more than $1 million each in the Texas state lottery. They belonged to a pool of 43 people organized by Peggy Dickson, 48, a bookkeeper at the town's cotton gin. Each wagered $10, enabling the pool to buy 430 tickets. The one that won paid $46.7 million--that's $54,255.81 a person each year for the next 20 years, or roughly $40,000 after taxes. Dickson had never before organized such a lottery syndicate, and many of its participants had never bought a lottery ticket. "It still doesn't feel exactly real," says Kathy Terry, one of 21 Terry kinfolk who won (they all are descendants of the town's founders).

Roby residents have reason to be suspicious of their good luck, which has been unfamiliar lately. Misfortunes have descended with biblical force: a three-year drought, a continuing plague of boll weevils and crashing cattle prices. Twenty-eight winners were farmers or ranchers, and three-fourths of them were in deep financial trouble. "In June they were fixing to come get our stuff," says Kathy Terry of the bankers who hold the notes on their farm. "We've kept it going only because we got a loan from my dad. My husband was already looking around for other work." Manuel Valdez, 43, and his wife Susie, 37, were close to losing Susie's Fish & Grill, which the couple sank their life savings into only five months before. Manuel, who had stopped by the cotton gin (owned by the Terrys, of course) for a cup of coffee and joined the lottery pool on a lark, says they could not have held out much longer. "This month I really didn't even want to come to work," he says. "I opened the checkbook, and we were down to our last $136." Another winner, Gene Terry, 61, says he had got so far into debt that he had to put up his two small farms as security. "A lot of these farmers just could not have kept farming another year if they had not won," says Mayor Cecil King.