“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.

The servant advanced towards us with the tray.

“The mescal plant,” explained Alvardo, pointing at the little discs, “grows precisely like these little buttons which you see here.  It is a species of cactus which rises only half an inch or so from the ground.  The stem is surrounded by a clump of blunt leaves which give it its button shape, and on the top you will see still the tuft of filaments, like a cactus.  It grows in the rocky soil in many places in the state of Jalisco, though only recently has it become known to science.  The Indians, when they go out to gather it, simply lop off these little ends as they peep above the earth, dry them, keep what they wish for their own use, and sell the rest for what is to them a fabulous sum.  Some people chew the buttons, while a few have lately tried making an infusion or tea out of them.  Perhaps to a beginner I had better recommend the infusion.”

I had scarcely swallowed the bitter, almost nauseous decoction than I began to feel my heart action slowing up and my pulse beating fuller and stronger.  The pupils of my eyes expanded as with a dose of belladonna; at least, I could see that Kennedy’s did, and so mine must have done the same.