'Permitting his English paper to touch my boot just now.'
'Absurd; I merely dropped it,' said Malcolm Skene, turning away and about to look at the paragraph again.
'You must, you shall apologize!' cried the Levantine bully, his sparkling eyes flaming and his pale cheek reddening with rage and rancour.
'This is outrageous. Stand back, fellow!' cried Malcolm, laying his left hand on the scabbard of his sword to bring the hilt handy.
'I mean what I say, Signor,' cried the Greek, snatching away the paper and treading it under foot.
'And so do I,' replied Malcolm, making a forward stride.
The hand of the Greek was wandering to the poniard in his girdle. Malcolm knew that in another moment it would be out; but, disdaining to draw his sword in an open thoroughfare and upon such an adversary, he clenched his right hand and dealt him, straight out from the shoulder, a blow fairly under the left ear that stretched him senseless in a heap on the pavement beside the marble table.
Thinking that he had sufficiently punished the fellow's overbearing insolence, Malcolm, with his usually quiet blood at fever heat, muttering with a grim laugh, 'That was not a bad blow for a kail-supper of Fife,' was turning away to leave the spot, when a dreadful uproar in the café behind him made him pause, and hearing shouts for succour in English he at once re-entered it.
There he found a number of Europeans and of British officers—chiefly middies—who had come by rail from Alexandria for a 'spree' in the city of the Caliphs, engaged in a fierce mêlée with a number of those ruffians who frequent such places.
The vicinity of the wretched roulette-table had been very much crowded, and a dozen or so of these thoughtless young Britons, who could not get near enough to stake their money personally, had been passing it on from one to another to stake it on the colours. A trivial dispute had occurred, and then a Greek ruffian, who was well known to be a terror to every gambling saloon, rushed forward with his cocked revolver, savagely resolute, and demanded as his, 'every piastre—yea, every para on the tables'—a demand not at all uncommon by such persons in such places. Greeks came in from all points, armed with cudgels and poniards, and in a moment a battle-royal ensued. The roulette-table was overturned, the chairs smashed, and bloodshed became plain on every hand.