The secret to "Dragon Wong" Lee's success in his earlier life blowing rock for the western railroads had been a combination of instinct and bravery. Working seven days a week on the cliffs, and being unusually observant, he had come to understand that any one stick of dynamite contained within its greasy wrapping 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 more Wong could increase its shattering effect. Few civil engineers 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 only means of detonation was an unreliable burning fuse. So the real secret to big bangs was bravery.

"Do you have the electrical batteries?" Wong asked.

"I got 'em," said the schooner's captain.

"And the wires?"

"All here. Now what?"

Wong savored the moment. The captain, a hard, brutal man who would knock his hat off in the street, was awed by Wong's dark skills.

"Now what?" 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 remove from one of the boxcars eight hundred fifty sixty-pound boxes of six-inch sticks that had been manufactured by the Du Pont de Nemours Powder Works in Wilmington, Delaware. Four more watched the Lillian I's crew stow the dynamite in the lighter's capacious hold. One, a bank auditor by training, harassed the lighter's captain by poring repeatedly through his invoices and dispatches.

Lillian I's master, Captain Whit Petrie, was in a foul mood. He had already missed a rising tide that would have sped his run upriver. Any more delay, he would be butting against the current the entire sixty miles to the traprock quarry at Sutton Point. On top of that, his new Southern Pacific bosses were even cheaper than his old New Jersey Central bosses, and even less inclined to spend money for necessary repairs on his beloved Oxford. Which they had renamed Lillian, against all tradition, when anyone with half a brain knew it was bad luck to change a vessel's name, tempting the fates, and, even worse, reducing her to a number, Lillian I, as if she were not a finer steam lighter than Lillians II through XII.

"Say, here's an idea," said the exasperated captain. "I'll go home and have supper with the wife. You boys run the boat."

Not one cop cracked a smile. Only when they were absolutely sure that he was delivering a legitimate cargo of twenty-five tons of dynamite to a legitimate contractor blasting traprock out of the Hudson Valley cliffs--a run up the river, he pointed out repeatedly, that he had been doing for eight years--did they finally let him go.