e.
He was a pleasant, smiling, bland, affable person, not unlike
Cowperwood in magnetism and subtlety, but different by a degree of
animal coarseness (not visible on the surface) which Cowperwood would
scarcely have understood, and in a kind of temperamental pull drawing
to him that vast pathetic life of the underworld in which his soul
found its solution. There is a kind of nature, not artistic, not
spiritual, in no way emotional, nor yet unduly philosophical, that is
nevertheless a sphered content of life; not crystalline, perhaps, and
yet not utterly dark--an agate temperament, cloudy and strange. As a
three-year-old child McKenty had been brought from Ireland by his
emigrant parents during a period of famine. He had been raised on the
far South Side in a shanty which stood near a maze of railroad-tracks,
and as a naked baby he had crawled on its earthen floor. His father
had been promoted to a section boss after working for years as a
day-laborer on the adjoining railroad, and John, junior, one of eight
other children, had been sent out early to do many things--to be an
errand-boy in a store, a messenger-boy for a telegraph company, an
emergency sweep about a saloon, and finally a bartender. This last was
his true beginning, for he was discovered by a keen-minded politician
and encouraged to run for the state legislature and to study law. Even
as a stripling what things had he not learned--robbery, ballot-box
stuffing, the sale of votes, the appointive power of leaders, graft,
nepotism, vice exploitation--all the things that go to make up (or did)
the American world of politics and financial and social strife. There
is a strong assumption in the upper walks of life that there is nothing
to be learned at the bottom. If you could have looked into the
capacious but balanced temperament of John J. McKenty you would have
seen a strange wisdom there and stranger memories--whole worlds of
brutalities, tendernesses, errors, immoralities suffered, endured, even
rejoiced in--the hardy, eager life of the animal that has nothing but
its perceptions, instincts, appetites to guide it. Yet the man had the
air and the poise of a gentleman.

To-day, at forty-eight, McKenty was an exceedingly important personage.
His roomy house on the West Side, at Harrison Street and Ashland
Avenue, was visited at sundry times by financiers, business men,
office-holders, priests, saloon-keepers--in short, the whole range and
gamut of acti