Both victims were badly injured. One of the two was a stocky, balding individual with a sandy fringe of hair. The other was tall and dark, with a swarthy complexion.
As the latter was lifted into the ambulance, he moaned and his jaw sagged.
Tom gasped as he saw that the man had several gold teeth. Was he the one who had caused the airport bomb scare?
“Will they live?” Bud asked the young intern who had examined the victims.
The medic shrugged. “Hard to say. They’re both in bad shape. They certainly won’t be able to answer any questions for a while.”
The crane crew continued working, with the scene lit up by floodlights.
Probing through the part of the building where the blast had centered, Tom found numerous parts and twisted structural members of his drone plane. He also discovered the blackened shell of the atomic capsule’s Durastress casing.
But the most surprising find came half an hour later-the tattered remnants of a quaint-looking volume entitled Travels in Remotest Araby!
“Cousin Ed’s book!” Tom exclaimed excitedly,
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as he picked it out of the debris and shook off the soot and ashes. “I must show this to him!”
Ed Longstreet was due in Shopton the next day. When he arrived, Tom, who was in Harlan Ames’s office, requested that Ed be sent there. He showed his cousin the book, which had proved to be not dangerously contaminated. Ed leafed through it, then his face darkened.
“A number of pages have been torn out!” he said. “The vital ones! Those that told about the Amir’s Mine!”