Molly backed the car around, the rear wheels churning up the sand, and plunged down the hill into the smoke. Through the choking fumes of this, Sylvia shouted at her, "Molly! Molly! You're _great_!" She felt that she would always hear ringing in her ears that thrilling, hoarse shout of relief. Molly shouted in answer, "I could scream, I'm so happy!" And as they plunged madly down the mountain road, she said: "Oh, Sylvia, you don't know--I never was any use before--never once--never! I got the first load of help there! How they shouted!" At the junction of the side-road with the highway, a car was discharging a load of men with rakes and picks. "_I_ took my car up!" screamed Molly, leaning from the steering wheel but not slackening speed as she tore past them. The driver of the other car, a young man with the face of a fighting Celt, flushed at the challenge and, motioning the men back into the car, started up the sandy hill. Molly laughed aloud. "I never was so happy in my life!" she said again. Both girls had forgotten the existence of Felix Morrison. They passed cars now, many of them, streaming south at breakneck speed, full to overflowing with unsmiling men in working clothes, bristling with long-handled implements. But as they fled down the street to the factory they saw, waiting still, some twenty or more men in overalls drawn up, ready, armed, resolute.... "How strong men are!" said Molly, gazing in ecstasy at this array of factory hands. "I love them!" She added under her breath, "But _I_ take them there!" While the men were swarming into the car, the gray-haired manager came out to report, as though to an officer equal in command, "I've telephoned to Ward and Howe's marble-works in Chitford," he said. "They've sent down fifty men from there. About seventy-five have gone from this village. I suppose all the farmers in that district are there by this time." "Will they ever stop it!" asked Sylvia despairingly, seeing wherever she looked nothing but that ravening, fiery leap of the flames, feeling that terrible hot breath on her cheek. The question and accent brought the man for the first time to a realization of the girls' youth and sex. He shifted to paternal reassurance. "Oh yes, oh yes," he said, looking up the valley appraisingly at the great volume of the smoke, "with a hundred and fifty men there, almost at once, they'll have it under control before long. Everything with a forest fire depends on getting help there _quickly_. Ten men there almost at once do more than fifty men an hour later. That's why your friend's promptness was so important. I guess it might have been pretty bad if they'd had to wait for help till one of them could have run to the village. A fire, a bad fire like that, gets so in an hour that you can't stop it--can't stop it till it gets out where you can plow a furrow around it. And that's a terrible place for a fire up there. Lots of slash left."