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."
Molly called over her shoulder to the men climbing on the car, "All ready there?" and was off, a Valkyr with her load of heroes.
Once more the car toiled and agonized up the execrable sandy steepness of the side-road; but in the twenty minutes since they had been there the tide had turned. Sylvia was amazed at the total shifting of values. Instead of four solitary workers, struggling wildly against overwhelming odds, a long line of men, working with a disciplined, orderly haste, stretched away into the woods. Imperious and savage, the smoke and swift flames towered above them, leaping up into the very sky, darkening the sun. Bent over their rakes, their eyes on the ground, mere black specks against the raging glory of the fire, the line of men, with an incessant monotonous haste, drew away the dry leaves with their rakes, while others who followed them tore at the earth with picks and hoes. It was impossible to believe that such ant-labors could avail, but already, near the road, the fire had burnt itself out, baffled by its microscopic assailants. As far as the girls could see into the charred underbrush, a narrow, clean line of freshly upturned earth marked where the fiercest of all the elements had been vanquished by the humblest of all the tools of men. Bewildered, Sylvia's eyes shifted from the toiling men to the distance, across the blackened desolation near them, to where the fire still tossed its wicked crest of flames defiantly into the forest. She heard, but she did not believe the words of the men in the car, who cried out expertly as they ran forward, "Oh, the worst's over. They're shutting down on it." How could the worst be over, when there was still that whirling horror of flame and smoke beyond them?
Just after the men had gone, exultant, relieved, the girls turned their heads to the other side of the road, and there, very silent, very secret and venomous, leaped and glittered a little ring of flames. An hour before, it would have looked a pretty, harmless sight to the two who now sat, stricken by horror into a momentary frozen stillness. The flames licked at the dry leaves and playfully sprang up into a clump of tall dry grass. The fire was running swiftly towards a bunch of dead alders standing at the edge of the forest. Before it had spread an inch further, the girls were upon it, screaming for help, screaming as people in civilization seldom scream, with all their lungs. With uplifted skirts they stamped and trod out, under swift and fearless feet, the sinister, silent, yellow tongues. They snatched branches of green leaves and beat fiercely at the enemy. It had been so small a spot compared to the great desolation across the road, they stamped out the flames so easily, that the girls expected with every breath to see the last of it. To see it escape them, to see it suddenly flare up where it had been dead, to see it appear behind them while they were still fighting it in front, was like being in a nightmare when effort is impossible. The ring widened with appalling, with unbelievable rapidity. Sylvia could not think it possible that anything outside a dream could have such devouring swiftness. She trod and snatched and stamped and screamed, and wondered if she were indeed awake….
Yet in an instant their screams had been heard, three or four smoke-blackened fire-fighters from beyond the road ran forward with rakes, and in a twinkling the danger was past. Its disappearance was as incredible as its presence.