But it's a cold fact, for all her being so good-natured and obliging, that wherever that Hen was there was a circus. It was on her account Charley and Denver had their little difficulty; and, one way and another, there 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 Fé 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.