“What shall we do about Darry?” cried Jessie, despairingly, as the Radio Girls stood arm in arm before the door of the lodge watching the terrifying progress of the fire. “If he has been imprisoned in the path of that fire——”

“Please, don’t, Jess!” implored Amy, shrinking back as a breath of hot wind fanned her face. “I can’t bear to think of my poor brother. If only we could have found him before the fire started!”

“Don’t go on believing the very worst,” chided Nell, gently. “He may have been imprisoned in that hut we saw in the swamp for all we know.”

“But the trail led away from it,” objected Amy.

“They may have doubled back on their tracks, just to elude pursuit,” said Jessie, eagerly willing to grasp at the smallest hope.

“I wonder if swamp grass burns,” said Amy.

Before any one could respond, the hot breath of the fire enveloped them, driving them toward the lake. The roar of the burning timber was terrifyingly loud and the smoke rolled toward them in a dense black cloud.

The girls put their hands before their smarting eyes and retreated still farther toward the lake. Through blurred vision they saw Fol dash from the lodge with Burd limping painfully after him.

They ran forward and intercepted the boys, demanding what they were going to do.

“Fight the fire, of course,” replied Fol, pulling impatiently away from their restraining hands. “I guess the rangers need every man they can get.”

“But you, Burd! You aren’t fit to go,” protested Amy. “Your foot——”

“I have forgotten all about my foot,” retorted Burd, with a grimness altogether new to him. “After the fire is over will be time enough to remember it.”

“If you can go, so can we!” cried Jessie, her eyes suddenly blazing with purpose.

“That’s the idea!” cried Amy and Nell, eagerly, and the boys paused for a moment to regard them admiringly.

“You girls are the real stuff, all right,” said Burd, and Fol added:

“Come along, and maybe they will have a gunny sack or two to spare.”

The girls did not understand this reference, but they were soon to have it explained to them. They battled their way through the increasingly heavy smoke and the scorching heat to the first line of the fire-fighters.

There men worked like fiends with the sweat streaming down their soot-stained faces, bloodshot eyes strained and set and determined. They worked with pick and shovel and hose and wet gunny sacks, chopping down ruthlessly branches of trees that were in the path of the fire, digging trenches in the earth to balk the darting flames, beating out with the sodden sacks little creeping hungry streams of fire that wriggled snakelike through the underbrush, the foreguard of fresh terror and destruction.

It was to this last task that the girls found themselves assigned. The forest rangers made no question of their presence there, merely taking time from their own fierce labors to motion to the gunny sacks.

The girls needed no further permission or instruction. Fired by the dauntless spirit of the men about them, stirred to fierce anger by the relentless onrush of the fire, they felt themselves suddenly incapable of fatigue or of fear.

Smoke burned their eyes, their throats were parched and dry. They tried to swallow and found their tongues swollen to twice the normal size.

Still they fought on, laying their dry and scorched sacks upon a pile of others and accepting new and sodden ones from the supply being constan............