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The bare, yellow-varnished wooden pews glowed with the reflection from the chandeliers. The seven-branched candlesticks on either side of the pulpit were entwined with smilax. The red plush curtain that hung in front of the Ark on ordinary days, and the red plush pulpit cover too, were replaced by gleaming white satin edged with gold fringe and finished at the corners with heavy gold tassels.
"Good. We fix 'em 'leven; come." So the game was on! I followed silently and savagely; for, as I have said, the human pawns who stood between me and my maid held no more value than the ants. For about ten minutes our progress went reasonably well, then Smilax slowed to a pace of extreme caution and finally sank to his hands and knees. In this manner we crawled a few hundred yards farther.
To have your head massaged by him was never to be forgotten, especially if you found your hat too small for your head in the morning. Also he singed the hair with a skill and care, which had filled many a thinly covered scalp with luxuriant growth, and his hair-tonic, known as "Smilax," gave a pleasant odour to every meeting-house or church or public hall where the people gathered.
Right at the road's edge grew Christmas lady, sensitive and woodsia ferns, mealy-bell-wort, true and false Solomon's Seal, ground ginger, greenbrier, smilax and flaming cardinal flowers which were lit up with flying gleams of sunshine, forming great masses of tremulous shifting mosaic of rarer and older designs than any that Persia or India yet know.
Bilkins had packed in a lot of stuff that he might have manipulated, though to me it was worse than Greek. Of course, I could cook up coffee and bacon the kind of meal Smilax and I were used to but Sylvia must never be subjected to that! And it would be insane of me to go out on the prairie after snipe!
That night I slept heavily, as a man who has regained the bloom of health, and awoke with the rosy dawn. A few fiery bars shot across the sky, which the trees, brush and grass reflected. Red, everywhere red; and I thought how much more red the night would be after Smilax and I had silenced Posts One and Two. I raised my head and looked for him. The fire was burning, our breakfast was cooking.
Beneath the cool, deep shade of these majestic trees the ground is occupied by ferns, chiefly woodwardia and aspidiums, with only a few flowering plants oxalis, trientalis, erythronium, fritillaria, smilax, and other shade-lovers.
It's going to be a stunner, I can tell you. There's palms and pots of flowers, and yards and yards of white and green ribbon tied in bows, and the pews are all tied round with evergreen boughs, and to-morrow the smilax is going up. I tell you, it's fine." "It must be," said Anderson. He strove to move on, but could not break free from the boy's little, clinging hand.
A large package that, from the extreme care of its handling, I judged must hold something highly explosive, on being opened divulged many dozens of the slender glass tubes, with a slight lip for holding cord or wire, such as, filled with roses or orchids, are hung in the garlands of asparagus vines and smilax in floral decorations of either houses or florists' windows.
"No stay long 'nough in there to get much hungry," Smilax shook his head. "One night and they pull um down and got us. Good to keep 'em off in daytime; after dark we run in grass." There was something in what he said. With the approach of evening a curious calm came over me.
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