ere was more shooting-scrapes about her than about all the
other girls put together in all the dance-halls in town. Why, it got
to be so that one corner of the new cemetery out on the mesa was
called her private lot. It wasn't her fault, she always said; and, in
one way, it wasn't--she always being willing to be sociable and
friendly all round. But, all the same, wherever that Sage-Brush Hen
was, there was dead sure to be an all-right cyclone.

* * * * *

One night when the boys at the Forest Queen was rigging Hill worse'n
usual, and the Hen all the time getting madder and madder, Santa Fe
Charley come into the game himself. Knowing how down the Hen was on
such doings he usually didn't. I guess he and she'd been having some
sort of a ruction that day, and he wanted to get even with her.
Anyhow, in he come--and the way he played his hand just got the Hen
right up on her ear.

What Charley did was to start a thirty-day pool on Hill as to when it
would happen. Chances was a dollar apiece--the dates for thirty days
ahead being written on bits of paper, and the bits crumpled up and
put into a hat, and you took one--and the pool went to whoever got
the right date, with consolation stakes to whoever got the day before
and the day after. Charley made a comical speech, after the drawing,
telling the boys it was what you might call a quick return investment,
and he guessed all of 'em had got left who'd drawed dates more'n a
week away. Hill took it all right, same as usual; and just to show 'em
he didn't bear no malice he bought a chance himself. He was one of the
best-natured fellows ever got born, Hill was. There wasn't no Apache
in him nowhere. He was white all the way through. So he bought his
chance, that way, and then he give it to the Hen--telling her if he
pulled the pot himself it wouldn't be much good to him, and saying he
hoped she'd get it if anybody did, and asking her--if she did get
it--to have some extry nice touches put on the board.

Well, will you believe it? When Hill give that Hen his chance she
begun to cry over it! She knew it wouldn't do to cry hard--seeing
what a mess it would make with her color when the tears got
running--and so she pulled herself up quick and mopped her eyes dry
with her pocket-handkerchief. And then she let out with all four legs
at once, like a Colorado mule, and everlastingly gave it to all hands!
It was just like the Hen, being so good-h