No sooner had Burton placed the gold nugget within his shirt pocket, Randy had, against the heat of the well-stoked fireplace behind them, taken off his coat, to reveal an arsenal that would have been the pride of any American frontiersmen. Burton noted with some distaste that two notches decorated the butt of one Colt, and one notch the butt of the other. Randy did notice Burton’s inquiring eyes and said nothing directly, but intoned cryptically in his harsh hashish-smoker’s voice, “Yez Mazder, there are so many ways for men to disagree. I, however, prefer the punctuation of the argument over the actual dialog.”

He unconsciously touched the sunken scar on his left cheek where the spear had entered his face level with the pallet. The pain then came, like a searing memory, across the roof of his mouth and—mostly—in the area where he lost the molars on the right side when the spear-point exited.

His astute drinking companion clearly noticed and appreciated the subconscious gesture with a twinkle of the eye.

Randy permitted him to recover from this lapse in self-discipline with an offer of loyalty, presumably in return for the assistance in his education just offered by Burton. “No boss of mine gets shived while I’m in the picture.”

Burton and his new friend drank away a few hours or so in the discussion of many things: body art, which the American wore like some Pacific islander; the relation of Gypsy Romany to other languages of the Indian subcontinent; the American’s theory on the spread of Аrуаn languages and culture; the evils of slavery; the superiority of various firearms; the ongoing annihilation of the American Indians, which interested Randy chiefly because his renegade younger brother appeared to be the father of various half-breed children and had fought against the Spanish on behalf of some savage prophet; and curiously enough, they spoke about Time.

The man speaks of Time as something tangible, a place in the cosmos that one could go to, rather than just the marking of the passage of lives and events.

Mister Bracken was proving to be a man with a formidable intellect who had apparently read from sources on various subjects that had somehow eluded Burton’s ravenous literary appetite. All-in-all Burton was beginning to feel as if he was being prepared for a proposal—and no doubt some oddly American argument—at the hands of the elusive Boss Stevenson.

Yes man, the shadow hanging over this well lubricated conversation has a name, and it is Stevenson. Cut to the chase—but more port first.

As Randy was once again spiking the first round from a fresh decanter of port—the fourth round it was—Burton intended to direct the conversation toward the American’s employer, but became ‘sidetracked’, as the Americans would say. “Dear Mister Bracken, whatever is the source of this colorless nectar?”

“It is moonshine Boss”, the man said as he once again screwed on the cap and placed it within the pocket of the coat now draped over the empty third chair.

“Well man, I could have used a supply of such while in the miasmal tropics—particularly in East Africa. I would, say, mix it with quinine and opium to alleviate the effects of malaria. Indeed, the stuff is so potent it might even cure the malarial blood of an explorer. What is the source?”

“My Pap used to distill it from corn mash in a copper still up in the hills of Tennessee; him and my Uncle Scott. I’m not a mash-cooker. I buy it from some inbred fuck above Romney West Virginia. I brought it with me because a little of this liquid packs a big punch. I normally drink One-fifty-one proof rum.”

“Do you imbibe at this level regularly Mister Bracken?”

“No Sir. This is a big occasion for me, meeting a great man like yourself. I prefer the leaf, the resin, and the oil of the cannabis plant, in reverse order. How about you Rick?”

“I am partial to Warburg drops and other opiate compounds for medicinal purposes. I must confess that drink has most often been a necessity for me in the tropics. In such places he who drinks water is the first to die you know.”

The American raised his glass and gave an unfortunate toast, “Here’s to not drinking strained Negro shit and diluted Spic piss.”

“Yaas, rudely stated but manifestly true, Mister Bracken.”

The American than downed his entire glass and rose, unbuttoning his shirt, and baring his leanly muscled chest to Burton. “These were my affiliation tattoos Rick, see.”

The man is finally becoming drunk.

Burton looked at the stark black ink art showing from under the pale violated skin of this exotic man, who brought to mind a character out of Melville’s Moby Dick. The tattoos themselves were hardly art, mostly being block letter statements of loyalty to the White Race. The few artistic flourishes were hopelessly and starkly industrial embodied with Dickensian woe. He had to admire the man’s verve though, as he pointed with pride to a physician’s syringe topped by the words ARYAN INJECTOR as if it were a bank note. The large one-dimensional syringe itself pointed down to the man’s private area providing a heavy-handed metaphor. Burton gave a hearty “Huzzah,” and waved some of the local cattle-hands over to view the ‘chest of dominance’ as Burton thought of the oddly etched torso. Randy slapped his chest before buttoning back up and purchased a decanter for his admirers, who had no understanding of the significance of the hideous body art.

The men then poured another round and began to discuss scarification in Africa and the Amazon basin. It had been a long while since Burton had enjoyed such convivial company, and he had fairly well managed to forget his lovely wife at the bottom of this endless glass of moonshine wine.

After receiving applause from Burton over a well-recited verse from the Vedas, the man reached within a secret compartment of his trail coat and produced an item of much reverence—a small hashish pipe, and an accompanying parchment wrapper, containing three penny-sized balls of oily resin. Burton could not resist. “And what manner of barbarous intoxicant might we have here my dear American friend?”

It was now time for Burton to be lectured. Pointing to the oiliest looking resin Randy declared, “This Rick is Nepalese finger hash!”

Burton sat back with fingers interlaced considering this bit of exotica that had somehow remained hidden from his prying mind. Mister Bracken, no longer the tight-lipped killer under the influence of the grape and the moonshine, began his brutal dissertation, “You do understand Rick that temperate plants—such as pine trees—secrete oils which congeal into bark resins in order to defend against forest fires. Now cannabis, being a tropical plant, secretes oils on its leaves to protect against being burned by the sun, forest fires being of little danger in the rain forests. As with any organic product, such as lemons or roses, the oil, or essence of the plant has a concentration of the flavor or active ingredient. I have my own methods—mainly through the adaptation of household crockery to this noble fucking purpose—for extracting the resin from the leaf and then the oil from the resin. As for the effects on the lungs, the leaf is worst, the resin somewhat milder, and the oil the best, purest delivery system. Now that is the best I can do in my kitchen, right there brother.”

Randy then broke up a small chunk of hashish or cannabis resin and loaded some into his pipe, which he lit, inhaled from, and then offered to Burton, who took a great inhalation, which the American referred to as a ‘hit’, as if from a water pipe. After they finished inhaling the wondrous fumes, Randy broke the remaining chunks of resin into small pieces and loaded these into the six cigars that Burton had on hand. Burton then gifted three of the cigars to his fellow amateur barbarian and savored the euphoria as Randy poured more moonshine wine and continued his dissertation, “Now a certain tribe of half-breed low-tech towel-head motherfuckers in Nepal have an even better way of isolating the coveted oil.”

The man then flashed a pair of devil’s eyes at Burton, and Burton reclined once again, the weight of the world off his shoulders, and the chill touch of Kismet’s vile hand temporarily forgotten as he re-laced the fingers of his world-weary hands and grinned. “Yaas Professor Bracken pray continue with your lecture. The assembled members of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain await your elucidation of the barbarous facts!”

Randy then stood and paced before the table lecturing with his long calloused trigger finger, “Okay, you’re a cannabis-cultivating God-forsaken dirty-sheet-wearing motherfucker tilling your Field of Dreams beneath the Roof of the World and you wish to distill resin without recourse to the lowly means of your barefoot and pregnant wife. What is a self-respecting mountain-dwelling mud-person to do?”

I am beginning to like this devil—more devil even than myself. A pity Blunt left!

Randy paused for emphasis and spread his hands expressively, “You need a fourteen-year-old boy! Now, the age has to do with the excretion of certain pungent hormones associated with the onset of puberty. But, since we are not talking about corn-fed American bucks growing balls at eleven or twelve, but the emaciated progeny of the rice-eating East, we are usually talking about fourteen-year-old boys. If the vagina you own has not provided you with a steady stream of boys, then you will have to get a loner—perhaps from the homosexual brothel-owner up the street who is casting off his worn-out queer-bait.”

How positively intriguing and at once disgusting are this man’s renderings of human activity. I would so like to take him back to London for a lecture tour!

Having reached a convenient point of pause, the American took another swallow of port and continued, “Now, odorous, naked former boy-toy in hand you are off to your cannabis field. You run the boy through the field, back and around, never retracing his steps. At last, after perhaps a mile run through your few acres of weed, the boy returns panting to you. At this point he is covered with cannabis resin which has blended with his body oils, residual hormones and body salts to form a thick film. Now you and other senior small-fingered mud-men of this blissful village run your fingers down the boy’s body, producing greasy nodules of adolescent scented cannabis resin, that can be sold to the Chinks, Pakis and Whites for a high price—the highest price in the world from the highest-elevation happy crops in the Far East!”

For emphasis the lecturer pointed his death-dealing finger at the genuine greasy article itself, sitting like a mud ball in a snow field on the unrolled parchment. The cantina had grown quiet at the ranting of ‘Professor’ Bracken. The windy rafters now echoed with the hearty clap of Burton’s hands, “Bravo Professor, Bravo!”

Randy seemed pleased with the drama and lucidity of his presentation and also accepted applause from the gathered Argentines, who knew only that it seemed prudent to indulge the maniacal American. Randy then invited all dozen of those assembled to stand table side and ‘partake’. He dried his glass with his scarf and upended it over the greasy nodule, lit the pungent combustible of human-hash grease and then demonstrated how one tilts the glass and sucks the smoke out from under it. Burton was given second and last smoke, but all of those assembled were granted the pleasure.

This man will undoubtedly go down in local legend as some pied piper of intoxication! Yes, this is the genuine article, the stuff by which the elder gods fashion the earthly chains of addiction to bind their mortal slaves…