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?