Jack Dawson, who never could take his liquor like any other man, but must fall into some extravagant humour, and he, I perceived, regarded some of the company with a very sour, jealous eye because, being warmed with drink, they fell to casting glances at Moll with a certain degree of familiarity.  Especially there was one fellow with a hook nose, who stirred his bile exceedingly, sitting with his elbows on the table and his jaws in his hands, and would scarcely shift his eyes from Moll.  And since he could not make his displeasure understood in words, and so give vent to it and be done, Jack sat there in sullen silence watching for an opportunity to show his resentment in some other fashion.  The other saw this well enough, but would not desist, and so these two sat fronting each other like two dogs ready to fly at each other’s throats.  At length, the hook-nosed rascal, growing bolder with his liquor, rises as if to reach for his wine pot, and stretching across the table, chucks Moll under the chin with his grimy fingers.  At this Jack flinging out his great fist with all the force of contained passion, catches the other right in the middle of the face, with such effect that the fellow flies clean back over his bench, his head striking the pavement with a crash.  Then, in an instant, all his fellows spring to their feet, and a dozen long knives flash out from their sheaths.

CHAPTER IX.

Of the manner in which we escaped pretty fairly out of the hands of Senor Don Lopez and his brigands.

Up starts Jack Dawson, catching Moll by the arm and his joint stool by the leg, and stepping back a pace or two not to be taken in the flank, he swings his stool ready to dash the brains out of the first that nears him.  And I do likewise, making the same show of valour with my stool, but cutting a poor figure beside Dawson’s mighty presence.

Seeing their fellow laid out for dead on the floor, with his hook nose smashed most horridly into his face, the others had no stomach to meet the same fate, but with their Spanish cunning began to spread out that so they might attack us on all sides; and surely this had done our business but that Don Lopez, flinging himself before us with his knife raised high, cries out at the top of his voice, “Rekbah!”—­a word of their own language, I am told, taken from the Moorish, and signifying that whosoever shall outrage the laws of hospitality under his roof shall be his enemy to the death.  And at this word every man stood still as if by inchantment, and let fall his weapon.  Then in the same high voice he gives them an harangue, showing them that Dawson was in the right to avenge an insult offered his daughter, and the other justly served for his offence to us.  “For his offence to me as the host of these strangers,” adds he, “Jose shall answer to me hereafter if he live; if he be dead, his body shall be flung to the vultures of the gorge, and his name be never uttered again beneath this roof.”