"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.
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