Sylvia’s eyes were still on the spot where he had disappeared when she was thrown violently back against the seat in a great leap forward of the car.  She caught at the side, at her hat, and saw Molly’s face.  It was transfigured.  The brooding restlessness was gone as acrid smoke goes when the clear flame leaps up.

“What are you doing?” shouted Sylvia.

“To get help,” answered Molly, opening the throttle another notch.  The first staggering plunge over, the car settled down to a terrific speed, purring softly its puissant vibrant song of illimitable strength.  “Hear her sing!  Hear her sing!” cried Molly.  In three minutes from the time the man had left them, they tore into the nearest village, two miles from the woods.  It seemed that in those three minutes Molly had not only run the car like a demon, but had formed a plan.  Slackening speed only long enough to waltz with the car on a street-corner while she shouted an inquiry to a passer-by, she followed the wave of his hand and flashed down a side-street to a big brick building which proclaimed itself in a great sign, “Peabody Brush-back Factory.”

The car stopped.  Molly sprang out and ran as though the car were a rifle and she the bullet emerging from it.  She ran into a large, ugly, comfortable office, where several white-faced girls were lifting their thin little fingers from typewriter keys to stare at the young woman who burst through and in at a door marked “Manager.”

“There’s a fire on the mountain—­a great fire in Hewitt’s pine woods,” she cried in a clear, peremptory voice that sounded like a young captain leading a charge.  “I can take nine men on my car.  Will you come with me and tell which men to go?”

A dignified, elderly man, with smooth, gray hair and a black alpaca office coat, sat perfectly motionless behind his desk and stared at her in a petrified silence.  Molly stamped her foot.  “There’s not an instant to lose,” she said; “they need every man they can get.”

“Who’s the fire-warden of this township?” said the elderly man foolishly, trying to assemble his wits.

Molly appeared visibly to propel him from his chair by her fury.  “Oh, they need help NOW!” she cried.  “Come on!  Come on!”

Then they stood together on the steps of the office.  “Those men unloading lumber over there could go,” said the manager, “and I’ll get three more from the packing-rooms.”

“Don’t go yourself!  Send somebody to get them!” commanded Molly.  “You go and telephone anybody in town who has a car.  There’ll be sure to be one or two at the garage.”

Sylvia gasped at the prodigy taking place before her eyes, the masterful, keen-witted captain of men who emerged like a thunderbolt from their Molly—­Molly, the pretty little beauty of the summer colony!

She had galvanized the elderly New Englander beside her out of his first momentary apathy of stupefaction.  He now put his own competent hand to the helm and took command.