“Don’t let him bluff you!” cried some one from the Fifth Ward. “Vote as you damn please, Jimmie!” “T’row the boots into ’im, Donnie!” “Soak him one!” “Take your hands off him, Bull Nolan!” So they bawled and Donahue wriggled. But the hand of Nolan, like the hand of Douglas, was his own, and gripped fast. Grogan, his face red, his eyes on fire, leaped from his place in his delegation, and started across the chairs for Nolan. The big saloon-keeper gave him a look out of his little eye. His left shoulder dipped, his left fist tightened. Grogan halted. “Vote, Jimmie, me lad,” said Nolan, in a soft voice. “Underwood!” said Donahue, in a whisper. His weak, pinched, hungry face turned appealingly toward Grogan. His blear eyes were filmy with disappointment. “He votes for John W. Underwood, Misther Chairman,” said Nolan complacently. The vote was unchanged. The chairman ordered another ballot. And then, all at once, as if a breath from a sanded desert had been blown into the room, Underwood was sensible of a change in the atmosphere. The air was perhaps no hotter than it had been for hours at the close of that stifling day, no bluer with tobacco smoke, no heavier with the smell borne in from Clark Street on hot night winds that had started cool and fresh from the lake four blocks away, a smell compounded of many smells, the smell ascending from foul and dark cellars beneath the sidewalk, the smell of stale beer, the ammoniac smell of filthy pavements, mingled with the feculence of unclean bodies that had sweated for hours in the vitiated air of that low-ceilinged, crowded room. It had a strange moral density that oppressed him, that oppressed all, even the politicians, for they ceased from cursing and from speech, and now sat sullen, silent, suspiciously eying their companions. It was an atmosphere charged with some ominous foreboding, some awful fear. Underwood had never felt that atmosphere before, yet, with a gasp that came not as an effect of the heat, he recognized its meaning. A hush fell. Muldoon, his black, curly locks shining with perspiration, was leaning on his improvised gavel, his keen eye, the Irish eye that so readily seizes such situations, darting into every face before him.