Malachi Nolan sat with his back to the window. His cropped gray hair showed his red scalp, the hard red skin on his face was closely shaven and shone on the points of his heavy jaw. In the round hole at the corner of his broad mouth was one of the long succession of cigars that had worn away the hole, sending up its perpetual incense. He never removed the cigar and seldom puffed it. It seemed to smoke of its own volition, and lasted a long time. When it consumed itself, Malachi replaced it with another. No one had ever seen him without a cigar in that hole at the side of his mouth. When he moved his thin lips to speak the cigar would stand out rigidly between his teeth. He spoke with his teeth clenched. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his shirt was clean and fresh, for he changed his linen daily, just as he shaved himself, relentlessly, every morning with a dull razor. On his glossy shirt front a great diamond, four carats in weight, sparkled leisurely as his enormous chest slowly rose and fell with his heavy breathing. This diamond was the central jewel of his alderman’s gold star, presented by constituents years before. The setting was so contrived that the stone could be unscrewed and made to serve as a stud. Malachi seldom wore the star, unless he went to a fire, or to a prize-fight across the Indiana line, or to the Olympic Theater, or got drunk. As he sat there in his warm saloon on this raw March morning, Malachi read his paper, read it carefully and slowly, first the front page, column after column, then the second page, and so on, methodically, through all the pages, except the editorials, which he skipped. His lips moved slightly as he read, for he had to pronounce the words to himself in order to get their full meaning. He read his paper thus every morning of his life, and his paper was all he ever did read. Malachi sat this morning, as on every other morning of the year, heavy, imponderable and solemn. The hour was ten o’clock. It was too early for business to begin in that saloon, so that the old bartender, who had been with Malachi for fifteen years, sat with his apron in his lap, against the whisky barrels that reached in rows from the slot machine back to the wooden stalls where many a campaign in the city council had been planned and its victory celebrated. The bartender was likewise reading a paper, the sporting news chiefly claiming his attention. By noon, aldermen and city hall employees would begin to drop in, and the place would liven up, but now the monotonous ticking of the Western Union clock on the wall could be heard all over the long room, and the big Maltese cat snoozed lazily at one end of the bar.