The boys set up a shout.

“Look out! you’ll run him down.  Look out——­”

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.”

The unconscious man was powerfully built, with face tanned brown above a yellow beard, from exposure to sun and wind.  As Jack had said, he did not look like a tramp.  Suddenly the boy noticed lying near him an object which had evidently fallen from the man’s pocket when he was struck and flung through the air by the auto.