---"

But their caution came too late. At top speed the auto struck the
wayfarer, and before the boys' horrified eyes he was thrown high in
the air, to fall, a confused sprawl of legs and arms, at the wayside.

CHAPTER XI.

BY THE ROADSIDE.

The boys ran forward across the few yards of meadow that intervened
between the Wondership and the roadway. The autoists did not,
apparently, notice them. They had stopped the car and were looking
back.

"Come on and let's get out of this quick," one of them, a hawk-faced
youth, with a long motoring duster on, was shouting to the driver.

"Yes, let's beat it while the going's good, Bill," came from his
companion as he addressed the driver of the car.

"I guess we'd better," said the man addressed as Bill.

Before the boys could intervene the car was on its way again, at top
speed, leaving the unconscious form of its victim at the roadside.

"Of all the cold-blooded scoundrels!" gasped Jack, horrified at such
callousness.

"Never mind them now," advised Tom. "Let's see if this poor fellow is
badly hurt. He may even be----"

He did not finish the sentence, but Jack knew what he meant. Hastily
the boys scrambled down the low bank that separated the field from the
road. They ran quickly to the man's side. To their great relief, for
they had feared that he might have been killed, the man was breathing.
But his breath came pantingly from his parted lips and there was a bad
cut on his forehead.

"Get some water from the creek yonder," said Jack, and Tom hastened up
the road to where, beneath the small wooden bridge, there flowed a
rivulet of water.

He was soon back, with his handkerchief well soaked, and with an old
can, that he had been lucky enough to find, filled with water. They
bathed the man's wound and then bound it up as best they could. But he
still lay senseless.

"Now what's to be done?" asked Tom.

"We ought to get him over to the Wondership and rush him to the
hospital at Nestorville," said Jack.

"Yes, that would be the thing to do. But he's too heavy for us to
carry," objected Tom.

"Why not fly over here alongside him. I guess we could lift him in;
that patch ought to hold by this time," suggested Jack.

"That's a good idea. What a pack of cowardly sneaks those chaps in
that car were."

"I wish we could have stopped them. It would give me real pleasure to
see a gang like that get its just deserts. They might have killed this
poor fellow."