The influence of his old circus career is apparent in his get-up. His worn clothes are flashy; he wears phony rings anda heavy brass watch-chain (not connected to a watch). Likemcgloin, he is slovenly. His head is thrown back, his big mouth open.

HARRY HOPE is sixty, white-haired, so thin the description “bag of bones” was made for him. He has the face of an old family horse, prone to tantrums, with balkiness always smoldering in its wall eyes, waiting for any excuse to shy and pretend to take the bit in its teeth. Hope is one of those men whom everyone likes on sight, a softhearted slob, without malice, feeling superior to no one, a sinner among sinners, a born easy mark for every appeal. He attempts to hide his defenselessness behind a testy truculent manner, but this has never fooled anyone. He is a little deaf, but not half as deaf as he sometimes pretends. His sight is failing but is not as bad as he complains it is. He wears five-and-ten-cent-store spectacles which are so out of alignment that one eye at times peers half over one glass while the other eye looks half under the other. He has badly fitting store teeth, which click like castanets when he begins to fume. He is dressed in an old coat from one suit and pants from another.

In a chair facing right at the table in the second line, between the first two tables, front, sits WILLIE OBAN, his head on his left arm outstretched along the table edge. He is in his late thirties, of average height, thin. His haggard, dissipated face has a small nose, a pointed chin, blue eyes with colorless lashes and brows. His blond hair, badly in need of a cut, clings in a limp part to his skull. His eyelids flutter continually as if any light were too strong for his eyes. The clothes he wears belong on a scarecrow. They seem constructed of an inferior grade of dirty blotting paper. His shoes are even more disreputable, wrecks of imitation leather, one laced with twine, the other with a bit of wire. He has no socks, and his bare feet show through holes in the soles, with his big toes sticking out of the uppers. He keeps muttering and twitching in his sleep.

As the curtain rises, rocky, the night bartender, comes from the bar through the curtain and stands looking over the back room. He is a Neapolitan-American in his late twenties, squat and muscular, with a flat, swarthy face and beady eyes. The sleeves of his collarless shirt are rolled up on his thick, powerful arms and he wears a soiled apron. A tough guy but sentimental, in his way, and good-natured. He signals to larry with a cautious “Sstt” and motions him to see if hope is asleep. LARRY rises from his chair to look at hope and nods to ROCKY. rocky goes back in the bar but immediately returns with a bottle of bar whiskey and a glass. He squeezes between the tables to LARRY.

ROCKY

In a low voice out of the side of his mouth.

Make it fast.

LARRY pours a drink and gulps it down. ROCKY takes the bottle and

puts it on the table where WILLIE OBAN is.

Don’t want de Boss to get wise when he’s got one of his tightwad buns on.

He chuckles with an amused glance at HOPE

Jees, ain’t de old bastard a riot when he starts dat bull about turnin’ over a new leaf? “Not a damned drink on de house,” he tells me, “and all dese bums got to pay up deir room rent. Beginnin’ tomorrow,” he says.