Pausing only long enough to lay aside the pens they had been using to sign the strange agreement, Mr. Swift and his friends rushed from the private office of the aged¹ inventor where the talk had been going on.

 

Silence had settled over the great Swift plant following that booming explosion. But the silence was quickly broken by voices calling:

 

“Fire! Fire! Fire!”

 

“Bless my insurance policy, something has happened!” gasped² Mr. Damon.

 

This was so obvious that no one took the trouble to agree with him.

 

“I hope nothing has happened to Tom!” exclaimed Mr. Swift.

 

As the four rushed out they were met by Eradicate³, an old colored man, a sort of family retainer, who was limping along, trying to forget his rheumatism⁴ long enough to keep pace with a veritable giant of a man who, with Eradicate, was rushing to tell Mr. Swift the news.

 

“Master’s shop—him go boom!” roared Koku, the giant whom Tom had captured during one of his strange trips.

 

“I seen it same as he did!” cried Eradicate in his quavering cracked voice. “Massa Tom’s office done cotch fire!” he added.

 

“That’s bad!” Mr. Swift murmured, as he looked toward the part of the works where his son had his own private place for experiments and tests. A pall⁶ of smoke hung over it.

 

While Tom’s father and his friends are rushing to do what they can to rescue the young inventor, something about the hero of this story will be told to new readers of this series.

 

Tom Swift lived with his father in their beautiful home in Shopton, a town in one of our Eastern states. Tom’s mother had been dead some years, and Mrs. Baggert was the housekeeper⁷, and a veritable second mother to the young inventor.

 

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