"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."