an angelic rescue

My sweet friend Linda Bailey is one of the reasons I have a blog.  Her blog inspires me to write every time I read it.
When she inboxed me on Facebook last weekend and asked me about the story of an angelic rescue I experienced some years back. When I agreed to retell the story, she suggested it be on my blog. Given her excellent instincts about such things, here goes:
I was headed down to Fort Worth, Texas with a suburban full of Girl Scouts. The national Girl Scout conference was in town and these were participants.
As we were driving along that early foggy morning, one of the girls said she smelled smoke. Then another. They stopped singing rounds and everyone sniffed the air and agreed: they definitely smelled smoke.
Then I noticed smoke coming from under the hood, definitely smoke. I exited and pulled into a convenience store. I stopped right up by the gas pump. The mention of that will probably get me stricken from the rolls of former Girl Scout leaders still in good standing. It was dumb; very dumb.
I told the girls to wait right there (also dumb) and I ran into the store in search of help or a fire extinguisher or both. The attendant looked to be about 12; way younger than any of the young women in my charge. As I turned to walk out of the store, wondering what to do next it hit me that I needed to get my charges out of that vehicle and get it away from the gas pumps.
It was still foggy and I squinted  around through the fog looking for someone who might know what to do.
A man appeared. Disheveled, barefoot, no fire extinguisher. He did not speak to me or anyone else. He walked to the front of my car and raised the hood. Flames shot out. I crawled back into the driver's seat. obviously having a dumb, dumb day. He was there, under the hood, several long minutes.
As I write this, I cannot remember for the life of me what he did there. I am not sure at all. All I know is that at some point he shut the hood, nodded to me and walked away on bare feet into the fog and disappeared.
I started the engine and pulled the car in the direction he had gone. But he had gone. I waited for smoke to barrel from under the hood again but it did not. I rolled down the window and inquired whether anyone saw where "that barefoot guy" went. No one saw anyone without shoes. It's too cold for that, someone said.
We slowly made out way on to Fort Worth and the conference, without incident. I called my husband and asked what to do. He came down with a friend, inspected the engine but saw nothing out of the ordinary. "We'll put it in the shop on Monday and see what's up," he told me. 
There were no problems on the trip home. There were no problems detected at the shop a few days later. There was no explanation. There still is not. Not as far as the car and what happened.
About the barefoot guy, I needed no explanation. He was an angel. I am certain of it. No one involved tried to change my mind about that but they couldn't have if they'd tried. I knew it them. I know it now. Some things even a dummy knows. When you've been rescued by an angel is one of them.