"This rock is part of it—"
"What do you mean by that!" Kelvin demanded savagely.
"I mean the way you work it. No system to it. No stratification, no plateau work..."
"Listen, Madison, don't talk about what you don't know anything about. The stuff in these walls isn't just rock; it isn't even plain granite. Granite City exports some of the finest grade of the stone in the world. And it's used all over the world. We aren't just a bunch of meatheaded ditch diggers—we are craftsmen. We have to figure a different way of getting out every piece of stone."
"It's too bad."
"What's too bad?"
"That you chose the wrong way so often," I said.
Kelvin breathed a virile grade of tobacco into my face. "Listen, Madison, we have been working this quarry for generations, sometimes more of us working than other times. Today most of us are working getting the stone out. That's the way we like it. We don't want any outsider coming in and interfering with that."
"If this quarry has anything to do with defrauding Manhattan-Universal, I can tell you that I will do something about that!"
As soon as my teeth clicked back together, the sickening feeling hit me that I shouldn't have said that.