Then the campaign, under Nolan’s management, in the most wonderful legislative district--a cosmopolitan district, bristling with sociological problems, a district that has fewer homes and more saloons, more commerce and more sloth, more millionaires and more paupers, and while it confines within its boundaries the skyscrapers, clubs, theaters and hundred churches of a metropolis, still boasts a police station with more arrests on its blotter than any other in the world. Night after night, with Nolan’s two candidates for the house, he spent in saloons where a candidate must treat and distribute his cards that the boys may size him up; lodging houses and barrel houses in lower Clark Street, where sweating negroes and frowsy whites drank five-cent whisky with him; blazing saloons along the levee, where even the poor, painted girls at the tables lifted their glasses when he ordered the drinks for the house; crap games and policy shops in lower Clark Street, the Syrian, Arabic, Chinese and Italian quarters down by the squalid Bad Lands, and at last a happier evening along the Archey Road. Underwood had three weeks of this, and as he stood in the convention hall that morning, unwashed, unshaven, his linen soiled, his shoes muddy, his own friends would not have known him, though he cared little enough for this now--they had all forgotten to go to the primaries the day before, and those for whom he had sent carriages had been too busy, or too respectable, to respond. The taste of bad beer and the scorch of cheap cigars still smacked in his mouth--indeed, he did not get them entirely out until he came back from Mt. Clemens two weeks after the nomination. But they were balloting for permanent chairman now. It would be a test vote; it would disclose his own strength and the strength of Conway. He looked over the red faces before him. He saw Conway himself moving among the delegates, snarling, cursing, quarreling with the friends of years; he saw Conway’s candidate for the house, McGlone, over in the Second Ward delegation, his coat off, a handkerchief about his fat neck, a fuming cigar between his chubby fingers, turning on his heavy haunches to revile some man who was numbered with Nolan’s crowd; he saw in the First Ward delegation, Malachi Nolan, clean-shaven, in black coat and cravat, his iron gray hair cropped short, calm alone of all the others. He would have looked the priest more than the saloon-keeper, had he smoked his cigar differently. Now and then he solemnly raised his hand, with almost the benediction of a father, to still the clamor of his delegation, which, with its twenty-one votes, was safe at all events for Underwood. Muldoon was Conway’s man--they would try to make the temporary organization permanent. D’Ormand was Underwood’s candidate. And Muldoon won. Underwood had lost the first round.