"All right! But don't put on a show this time." Tesno swung his feet off the bed and sat up. "Go to Pinky quietly and tell him to get shed of that dealer. He probably doesn't know he's got a card mechanic there."
"You know b-better than that!" Willie stood up and gripped the back of his chair. "That Pinky never does anything honest if he can do it crooked. That place is rotten as hell's swill b-bucket, and I should th-think you'd be glad to s-see it go b-bust!"
Tesno got slowly to his feet and stretched. "I have no love for Pinky. But he owns only a small chunk of that place."
Tesno threw an arm around Willie's shoulders and led him to the door. "For the time being, Willie, keep your eyes open and don't stir up trouble."
Willie turned in the doorway with hurt written on his face.
"I'll be d-damned if you don't sound exactly like M-Madrid!"
Tesno laughed and closed the door. Turning to the washstand, he soberly regarded himself in the small square mirror above it.
Nobody ever knew exactly what happened that night or exactly who was to blame. But it seemed clear that dynamiter Heinie Hinkleman got his fuses fouled up and also that the foreman of the shoring crew was lax about getting his men to safety. The heading crew got clear in plenty of time and warned the bench gang on the way out; but when Heinie came jogging along in his leisurely flat-footed way, half a dozen workers were still putting up shoring. Heinie told them for cripes sake the fuses were lit, and he herded them ahead of him toward the portal.
The fuses were cut for six minutes, he said, which would have been more than enough time to get the hell out of there. But Heinie had miscalculated for the first and last time in his career, and the blast caught them before they had gone a dozen yards. Rock hurtled out of the heading like shot from a gigantic gun barrel. An egg-sized splinter caught Heinie in the back of the skull and buried itself in his brain. Two of the others were dead when the dust cleared enough for rescuers to get to them. The other four were carried out stunned and just a whisper away from suffocation.