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“In his cabin”
The captain was a hard-bitten water whiskey, Chinese opiu friendlier jurisdictions across the river Crie to safer shores were found facedown in the Lower Bay, and word had gotten around the underworld never to cheat Captain Paul Yatkowski and hisBen” Weitzman
“What do you got, Chinaman?”
Wong Lee put down his sack and gently tugged open the drawstring Then he felt carefully a the clean shirts and sheets and rein
“I have everything I need,” he replied Inside the tin was a rack made of a metal plate drilled with holes into which fit copper capsules so that they could be stored and carried without touching one another There were thirty holes, each filled with a copper capsule as big around as a pencil and half as long Fro in the top of each extended two insulated “leg wires” They were No 6 high-grade mercury-fulminate detonators, the most powerful
The secret to “Dragon Wong” Lee’s success in his earlier life blowing rock for the western railroads had been a co seven days a week on the cliffs, and being unusually observant, he had come to understand that any one stick of dyna more power than was supposed It all depended upon how quickly it exploded He had developed an innate understanding that multiple detonators fired simultaneously sped up the rate of detonation
The faster a charge exploded, the greater the power, the ineers had understood that thirty years ago when dynamite was relatively new, still fewer illiterate Chinese peasants Fewest of all had been brave enough, before electrically fired blasting caps reduced the danger, to take the chances that had to be taken when the onlyfuse So the real secret to big bangs was bravery
“Do you h
ave the electrical batteries?” Wong asked
“I got ‘em,” said the schooner’s captain
“And the wires?”
“All here Nohat?”
Wong savored the moment The captain, a hard, brutal man ould knock his hat off in the street, ed by Wong’s dark skills
“Nohat?” Wong repeated “Now I get busy You sail boat”
A DOZEN RIFLE-TOTING RAILROAD police guarded a string of six boxcars on the powder pier Three kept a sharp eye on the gang of day laborers hired to reht hundred fifty sixty-pound boxes of six-inch sticks that had been ton, Delaware Four hter’s capacious hold One, a bank auditor by training, harassed the lighter’s captain by poring repeatedly through his invoices and dispatches