Book #1 in the Tom Swift 100th Anniversary Project. Eighteen year old inventor and mechanical genius, Tom Swift longs to have a motor cycle. Suddenly, one nearly lands in his lap and the distraught owner sells it to Tom. While it runs well. Tom knows that he can make improvements to it to make it run smoother and. more importantly, faster. He has problems with his teenage rival, Andy Foger, who is forever trying to outdo Tom. But now, a mysterious gang of thieves have come to Shopton and Tom hopes to leave Andy in the dust as he tries to unravel the mystery behind the thieves, and a strange hobo who appears just when it is the most inconvenient for our hero. Tom is attacked and waylaid by the gang when they discover that he is on their trail. -------------------------------------------- This book has been substantially rewritten to remove outright racism and to enhance the mechanical and technical interests. Many books of this era used sentence structures, certain words and even punctuation in ways that can be confusing to younger readers today. So, every effort has been made to alleviate this issue while retaining the flavor of a story first told more than a century before.