ve, subtle, political life. From McKenty they could
obtain that counsel, wisdom, surety, solution which all of them on
occasion were anxious to have, and which in one deft way and
another--often by no more than gratitude and an acknowledgment of his
leadership--they were willing to pay for. To police captains and
officers whose places he occasionally saved, when they should justly
have been discharged; to mothers whose erring boys or girls he took out
of prison and sent home again; to keepers of bawdy houses whom he
protected from a too harsh invasion of the grafting propensities of the
local police; to politicians and saloon-keepers who were in danger of
being destroyed by public upheavals of one kind and another, he seemed,
in hours of stress, when his smooth, genial, almost artistic face
beamed on them, like a heaven-sent son of light, a kind of Western god,
all-powerful, all-merciful, perfect. On the other hand, there were
ingrates, uncompromising or pharasaical religionists and reformers,
plotting, scheming rivals, who found him deadly to contend with. There
were many henchmen--runners from an almost imperial throne--to do his
bidding. He was simple in dress and taste, married and (apparently)
very happy, a professing though virtually non-practising Catholic, a
suave, genial Buddha-like man, powerful and enigmatic.

When Cowperwood and McKenty first met, it was on a spring evening at
the latter's home. The windows of the large house were pleasantly
open, though screened, and the curtains were blowing faintly in a light
air. Along with a sense of the new green life everywhere came a breath
of stock-yards.

On the presentation of Addison's letter and of another, secured through
Van Sickle from a well-known political judge, Cowperwood had been
invited to call. On his arrival he was offered a drink, a cigar,
introduced to Mrs. McKenty--who, lacking an organized social life of
any kind, was always pleased to meet these celebrities of the upper
world, if only for a moment--and shown eventually into the library.
Mrs. McKenty, as he might have observed if he had had the eye for it,
was plump and fifty, a sort of superannuated Aileen, but still showing
traces of a former hardy beauty, and concealing pretty well the
evidences that she had once been a prostitute. It so happened that on
this particular evening McKenty was in a most genial frame of mind.
There were no immediate political troubles bothering him just now