he matter to Mr. Swift and his son, with whom he took up his
residence. This fitted right in with Tom's ideas, and soon father, son
and the balloonist were constructing the Red Cloud, as they named their
airship. It was finally completed, as related in "Tom Swift and His
Airship," made a successful trial trip, and won a prize. It was planned
to make a longer journey, and Tom, Mr. Sharp and Mr. Damon agreed to go
together. Mr. Damon was an odd individual, who was continuously
blessing some part of his anatomy, his clothing or some inanimate
object but, for all that, he was a fine man.

The night before Tom and his friends started off in their airship, the
Shopton Bank vault was blown open and seventy-five thousand dollars was
taken. Tom and his friends did not know of this, but, no sooner had the
young inventor, Mr. Sharp and Mr. Damon sailed away, than the police
arrived at Mr. Swift's house to arrest them. They were charged with the
robbery, and with having sailed away with the booty.

It appeared that Andy Foger said he had seen Tom hanging around the
bank the night of the robbery, with a bag of burglar tools in his
possession. Search was immediately begun for the airship, the occupants
of which were, meanwhile, speeding on.

Tom and his two friends had trouble. They were nearly burned up in a
forest fire, and were fired upon by a crowd of people with rifles, who,
reading of the bank robbery and the reward offered for the capture of
the thieves, hoped to bring down the airship. The fact that they were
fired upon caused Tom and the two aeronauts to descend to make an
investigation, and for the first time they learned of the bank theft.
How they got track of the real robbers, took the sheriff with them in
the airship, and raided the gang will be found set down at length in
the book. Also how Tom administered well-deserved thrashing to Andy
Foger.

Mr. Swift did not accompany his son in the airship, and when asked why
he did not care to make the trip, said he was working on a new type of
submarine boat, which he hoped to enter in the government trials, to
win a prize. In the fourth volume of the series, called "Tom Swift and
his Submarine," you may read how successful Mr. Swift was.

When the submarine, called the Advance, was finished, the party made a
trip to recover three hundred thousand dollars in gold from a sunken
treasure ship, off the coast of Uruguay, South America. They sailed
beneath the seas for many