Men were screaming, brandishing fists, waving hats, coats, anything, scraping chairs, pounding the floor with them. There were heavy, brutal oaths, and, here and there, the smack of a fist on a face. In the tumult, the five Simmons votes went to Conway. Muldoon was beating the table with his club and crying: “Order! order! order!” “To hell with order!” bawled some one from the First Ward delegation. “On this ballot,” Muldoon was calling, “there were sixty-nine votes cast; necessary to a choice, thirty-five. James P. Conway has received forty votes; John W. Underwood, twenty-nine, and George W. Simmons”--he paused, as if to decipher the vote--“none. James P. Conway, having received the necessary number of votes, is therefore declared the nominee of this convention.” Underwood was stunned. He staggered through the horrible uproar toward the door. He longed for the air outside, even the heavy air of lower Clark street, where the people surged along under the wild, dazzling lights, in two opposite, ever-passing processions. His head reeled. He lost the sense of things, the voices about him seemed far away and vague, he felt himself detached, as it were, from all that had gone before. But as he pressed his way through the crowd that blocked the entrance, and plunged toward the stairs, he saw Baldwin, mopping the red band on his white brow. Baldwin recognized him, and said, with his everlasting smile: “Sorry, my boy--next time!” MALACHI NOLAN Malachi Nolan sat by the roll-top desk in the front window of his saloon. The desk was unopened, for Malachi seldom had occasion to use it. The only letters he ever wrote were to whisky houses in Peoria or Louisville, and then the process was a painful one. His mighty haunches completely filled the chair, which, in turn, completely filled the space railed off in front of the partition that screened the bar. The saloon was in a basement in Dearborn Street, and, to get to it, you had to go down four stone steps, hollowed by countless feet in the long years he had kept there. Outside, over the door, a long, black sign bore his simple device--M. Nolan.