ralls 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 t