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.

“Ain’t that just like a fire in the woods?” said one of the men, an elderly farmer.  He drew a long, tremulous breath.  “It’s so tarnation quick!  It’s either all over before you can ketch your breath, or it’s got beyond you for good.”  It evidently did not occur to him to thank the girls for their part.  They had only done what every one did in an emergency, the best they could.  He looked back at the burned tract on the other side of the road and said:  “They’ve got the best of that all right, too.  I jest heard ’em shoutin’ that the men from Chitford had worked round from the upper end.  So they’ve got a ring round it.  Nothin’ to do now but watch that it don’t jump.  My!  ’Twas a close call.  I’ve been to a lot of fires in my day, but I d’know as I ever see a closeter call!”

“It can’t be over!” cried Sylvia, looking at the lurid light across the road.  “Why, it isn’t an hour since we—­”

“Land!  No, it ain’t over!” he explained, scornful of her inexperience.  “They’ll have to have a gang of men here watchin’ it all night—­and maybe all tomorrow—­’less we have some rain.  But it won’t go no further than the fire-line, and as soon as there’re men enough to draw that all around, it’s got to stop!” He went on to his companion, irritably, pressing his hand to his side:  “There ain’t no use talkin’, I got to quit fire-fightin’.  My heart ’most gi’n out on me in the hottest of that.  And yit I’m only sixty!”