“Bright boy,” Quiz said sarcastically. “Maybe Captain Kidd sailed all the way to Red Lake to bury his booty.”
Sandy and Jerry dropped to their knees and began scooping the loose earth away from the spot with their hands. Quickly they uncovered the edge of what seemed to be a flat sheet of metal. They continued digging until they had uncovered enough of the object for Sandy to get a grip on it. He pulled and tugged, but it was immovable.
“This is only a small piece of whatever it is,” he said finally. “It’s buried pretty deep.”
Quiz, who had come up behind them, was studying the exposed metal with keen interest. “Dig some more,” he told them.
As the boys pawed away at the earth like dogs, the strange object began to assume form—a vaguely familiar form, Sandy thought. It was coated with a heavy, dull green paint.
“Oh, good night!” Quiz whispered suddenly. “You know what that looks like?”
At that instant the same idea must have struck both Sandy and Jerry, for they stopped digging and looked up with stricken expressions.
“It looks like a fin—a fin on the tail of a bomb!” Sandy said tremulously.
“It couldn’t be!” Jerry’s voice cracked. “Or could it?”
Quiz adjusted his smashed glasses and peered more closely at the mysterious object. “It could be and it is! That’s a fin all right. I saw a newsreel once showing a demolition squad removing a dud bomb from a meadow in England; it had been there ever since World War Two. And it was lying half-buried in a crater just like this one.”