n side there! You're crowding me!"

"I am not!" yelled back Tom, above the explosions of his machine.

The two were now racing furiously, and Andy, with a savage look, tried
to get more speed out of his car. In spite of all the bully did, Tom
was gradually forging ahead. A little hill was now in view.

"Here's where I make him take my dust!" cried Andy, but, to his
surprise Tom still kept ahead. The auto began to lose ground, for it
was not made to take hills on high gear.

"Change to third gear quick!" cried Sam.

Andy tried to do it. There was a hesitancy on the part of his car. It
seemed to balk. Tom, looking back, slowed up a trifle. He could afford
to, as Andy was being beaten.

"Go on! Go on!" begged Pete. "You'll have to keep on fourth gear to
beat him, Andy."

"That's what!" murmured the bully. Once more he shifted the gears.
There was a grinding, smashing sound, and the car lost speed. Then it
slowed up still more, and finally stopped. Then it began to back down
hill.

"I've stripped those blamed gears!" exclaimed Andy ruefully.

"Can't you beat him?" asked Pete.

"I could have, easily, if my gears hadn't broken," declared the bully,
but, as a matter of fact, he could not have done so. "I oughtn't to
have changed, going up hill," he added, as he jammed on the brakes, to
stop the car from sliding down the slope.

Tom saw and heard.

"I thought you were so anxious to race," he said, exultantly, as well
he might. "I don't want to try a contest down hill, though, Andy," and
he laughed at the red-haired lad, who was furious.

"Aw, go on!" was all the retort the squint-eyed one could think of to
make.

"I am going on," replied our hero. "Just to show you that I can go down
hill, watch me."

He turned his motor-cycle, and approached Andy's stalled car, for Tom
was some distance in advance of it, up the slope by this time. As he
approached the auto, containing the three disconcerted cronies,
something bounded out of Tom's pocket. It was the bottle of stove
blacking he had purchased for Mrs. Baggert. The bottle fell in the soft
dirt in front of his forward wheel, and a curious thing happened.
Perhaps you have seen a bicycle or auto tire strike a stone at an
angle, and throw it into the air with great force. That was what
happened to the bottle. Tom's front wheel struck the cork, which fitted
tightly, and, just as when you hit one end of the wooden "catty" and it
bounds up, the bottle described a curv