"The bundle is here all right. Pushed back against the third
series motors. Come up here, one of you fellows

Suddenly there was a noise at the end of the shed where the
door to the offices lay. Two figures burst through from the glass
doors and charged down the lanes between the lathes and cranes.
Ned Newton led, Rad Sampson, his face a mouse-gray with fear,
followed.

"Massa Tom! Massa Tom!" shouted the colored man. "Look out fo'
de bomb! Look out fo' de bomb!"

The foreman sprang toward the high door of the locomotive where
Tom stood, staring out. The young inventor, quick as his mind
usually functioned, did not understand at all what Eradicate
meant.

"There's something wrong in there, Mr. Tom!" shouted the
foreman. "Come down, sir, and let me get up there and see what it
is."

But Mr. Barton Swift grasped the meaning of what was going on
more quickly than anybody else. Tom's father, Tom frequently
said, had spent so many years investigating chemical and
mechanical mysteries that he saw more clearly and more exactly
into and through most problems than other people.

His raised voice now cut through the rumble of machinery and
all the other noises of the shop. Even Rad Sampson's delirious