The fire was roaring down one side of the road towards them, and away to the right was eating its furious, sulphurous way into the heart of the forest.  They stopped a hundred feet short, but the blare of heat struck on their faces like a blow.  Through the dense masses of smoke, terrifying glimpses of fierce, clean flame; a resinous dead stump burning like a torch; a great tree standing helpless like a martyr at the stake, suddenly transformed into a frenzied pillar of fire....  Along the front of this whirlpool of flame toiled, with despairing fury, four lean, powerful men.  As they raised their blackened, desperate faces and saw the car there, actually there, incredibly there, black with its load of men, they gave a deep-throated shout of relief, though they did not for an instant stop the frantic plying of their picks and hoes.  The nine men sprang out, their implements in their hands, and dispersed along the fighting-line.

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.