"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." She took the place beside him. As the whisky went round after round the two seemed shut away from the others; they were younger, less 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 sledgehammer. 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 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 hangover 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' down at him somebody seen what had happened and spread the word. "I wasn't none too popular, bein' not much on talk, so the boys got together and pretty soon they come pilin' through the door at me, packin' everything from hatchets to crowbars. "Lads, I was sorry about Scotchy, but after I glimpsed that gang comin' I wasn't sorry for nothing. I felt like singin', though there wasn't no song that could say just what I meant. But I grabbed up the big fourteen-pound hammer and met 'em halfway.