knowing how he'd done it--run
him so close up against a shooting-scrape. But the Hen was the limit:
she looking and acting like the school-ma'am she said she was, and yet
tangled up in a bar-room with a lot of gamblers and such as Kerosene
Kate and old Tenderfoot Sal and Carrots--and then bringing the two
ends together by talking one minute like he was used to East, and the
next one wanting to set up drinks for him and telling him she knowed
all there was to know about gun-handling and how at lion-hunting she
was just hell! I guess he was more'n half excusable, that young feller
was, for looking like he couldn't be counted on for telling for
certain on which end of him was his heels!

What he did manage to work out clear in that fool head of his was he
had the chance to get the drink he needed, and needed bad, to brace
him; so over he come with the Hen to the bar and got it--and it seemed
to do him some good. Then Carrots--who'd begun to ketch on a little to
what the Hen was after--spoke up and told him it was true what Miss
Sage had told him about her kittenishness, and she hadn't meant
nothing when she was talking about smacking him; and to show he had no
hard feeling, she said, he must have one on her. Then Blister Mike,
having sized matters up, chipped in too: saying it would make him feel
comfortabler--having done some joking himself by talking the way he
did and getting his gun out--if they'd all have one on the bar.

As drinks in Palomitas was sighted for a thousand yards, and carried
to kill further, by the time Boston had three of 'em in him--on top of
the ones he'd had with Wood at supper--he was loaded enough to be
careless about what was happening among the sunspots and ready to
take things pretty much as they come along. The boys was ready for
what might be coming too: allowing for sure the Hen was getting a
circus started, and only waiting to follow suit to the cards she put
down.

What was needed, it turned out, was stacked with Shorty Smith; and the
Hen sort of picked up Shorty with her eyes and says to him: "Your
little boy Gustavus--he is _such_ a dear little fellow, and I do love
him so!--was telling me at recess to-day, Mr. Smith, that you saw a
lion when you were out in the mountains day before yesterday
prospecting. I think that very likely you may have seen the fierce
creature even more recently; and perhaps you will have the kindness to
tell us"--the Hen winked her off eye at Shorty to show h