“Mescal?” I repeated blankly at first, then feeling a nudge from Kennedy, I added hastily: “Oh, yes, to be sure. I think I have heard of it. It's a Mexican drink, is it not? I have never had the pleasure of tasting it or of tasting that other drink, pulque—poolkay—did I get the accent right?”
I felt another, sharper nudge from Kennedy, and knew that I had only made matters worse.
“Mr. Jameson,” he hastened to remark, “confounds this mescal of the Indians with the drink of the same name that is common in Mexico.”
“Oh,” she laughed, to my great relief, “but this mescal is something quite different. The Mexican drink mescal is made from the maguey-plant and is a frightfully horrid thing that sends the peon out of his senses and makes him violent. Mescal as I mean it is a little shrub, a god, a cult, a religion.”
“Yes,” assented Kennedy; “discovered by those same Kiowa Indians, was it not?”
“Perhaps,” she admitted, raising her beautiful shoulders in polite deprecation. “The mescal religion, we found, has spread very largely in New Mexico and Arizona among the Indians, and with the removal of the Kiowas to the Indian reservation it has been adopted by other tribes even, I have heard, as far north as the Canadian border.”
“Is that so?” asked Kennedy. “I understood that the United States government had forbidden the importation of the mescal plant and its sale to the Indians under severe penalties.”
“It has, sir,” interposed Alvardo, who had joined us, “but still the mescal cult grows secretly. For my part, I think it might be more wise for your authorities to look to the whiskey and beer that unscrupulous persons are selling. Senor Jameson,” he added, turning to me, “will you join us in a little cup of this artificial paradise, as one of your English writers—Havelock Ellis, I think—has appropriately called it?”
I glanced dubiously at Kennedy as Senora Mendez took one of the little buttons out of the silver tray. Carefully paring the fuzzy tuft of hairs off the top of it—it looked to me very much like the tip of a cactus plant, which, indeed, it was—she rolled it into a little pellet and placed it in her mouth, chewing it slowly like a piece of chicle.
“Watch me; do just as I do,” whispered Kennedy to me at a moment when no one was looking.