air. She held out her hand.

"Will you shake and call it square?"

"I sure will," nodded Pierre.

"And we're pals--you and me, like the rest of 'em?"

"We are."

"Shake again."

She took the place beside him.

Garry Patterson was telling how he had said farewell to a Swedish
sweetheart, and the roar of laughter took the eyes away from Jacqueline
for a moment. So she leaned to Pierre le Rouge and whispered at his
ear: "Pierre you've made me the happiest fellow on the range."

As the whisky went round after round and the fun waxed higher the two
seemed shut away from the others; they were younger, less touched and
marked by life; they listened while the others talked, and now and then
exchanged glances of interest or aversion.

"Listen," she said after a time, "I've heard this story before."

It was Phil Branch, square-built and square of jaw, who was talking.

"There's only one thing I can handle better than a gun, and that's a
sledge-hammer. A gun is all right in its way, but for work in a crowd,
well, give me a hammer and I'll show you a way out."

Bud Mansie grinned: "Leave me my pair of sixes and you can have all the
hammers between here and Central Park in a crowd. There's nothing
makes a crowd remember its heels like a pair of barking sixes."

"Ah, ah!" growled Branch. "But when they've heard bone crunch under
the hammer there's nothing will hold them."

"I'd have to see that."

"Maybe you will, Bud, maybe you will. It was the hammer that started
me for the long trail west. I had a big Scotchman in the factory who
couldn't learn how to weld. I'd taught him day after day and cursed
him and damn near prayed for him. But he somehow wouldn't learn--the
swine--ah, ah!"

He grew vindictively black at the memory.

"Every night he wiped out what I'd taught him during the day and the
eraser he used was booze. So one fine day I dropped the hammer after
watchin' him make a botch on a big bar, and cussed him up one leg and
down the other. The Scotchman had a hang-over from the night before
and he made a pass at me. It was too much for me just then, for the
day was hot and the forge fire had been spitting cinders in my face all
morning. So I took him by the throat."

He reached out and closed his taut fingers slowly.

"I didn't mean nothin' by it, but after a man has been moldin' iron,
flesh is pretty weak stuff. When I let go of Scotchy he dropped on the
floor, and while I stood starin' do