The humid low-level sky oppressed him. He missed the immense skyscapes of the mountains and the deserts. And he thought, as he had thought many times before, that one day he would write Ernie Danilov a letter and tell the managing editor he was quitting.
He would enjoy writing that letter. And then, just a few minutes before McDaniels walked in, he sat down again at his desk. Governor Paul Roark remains coy about the U. Senate race upcoming next year. But if you make political bets, consider these facts:. The tax-reform package the Governor and his supporters are now trying to ram through the legislature would make an excellent plank for a campaign in the Democratic senatorial primary.
Friends of incumbent U. The veteran Congressman and Korolenko—himself a former Governor and ex-Congressman—are close friends of Roark and supported his race for Governor four years ago. It was exactly at this point that McDaniels came through the pressroom doorway. Cotton was leaning back in his chair, looking at his note pad. And there was McDaniels wobbling into the room, fat, rumpled and obviously drunk.
His voice was curt. It made him nervous. When he drank seriously himself, he drank in the safety of solitude. He recognized it as a weakness and he had tried once or twice—without success—to understand this quirk. He sat down heavily and fumbled with copy paper.
Cotton felt himself relaxing, relieved that McDaniels was not in the mood for alcoholic soul baring. The Western Union clock above the pressroom door showed , which meant Cotton had thirty-one minutes to write four or five more brief items to complete his column, punch it into perforated tape and teletype it three hundred miles across the state to the Tribune newsroom before the overnight desk shut down. Plenty of time. Cotton wasted a few moments of it wondering where the Capitol-Press reporter had been doing his drinking.
Probably down the hall in the suite of the Speaker of the House. Bruce Ulrich always had a bottle open. What was he going to say when he got there? What would he say to the officer in charge? It would probably be a Utah state cop, or a San Juan County deputy. He tried to imagine the conversation. Then what? Then what would they say? An even more dreadful thought emerged. The next step. Bernie would be outraged, furious, terminally resentful.
This map includes a guided tour through each chapter of "The Blessing Way," and displays the major southwestern geographic references mentioned in the novel. It includes locations in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, as well as several fictional locations that Tony Hillerman made up for the novel. Click on the thumbnail image to open the map in your browser and start the tour. Click the up or down arrows to advance through the tour, or click on a map marker to see a brief description of the location.
This map displays the major southwestern geographic references mentioned in the novel, "The Boy Who Made Dragonfly. Hair in Bun stepped into the doorway, pulled his hands out of the bib of his overalls, and let them hang by his sides. Leaphorn stopped. The voice remained mild. The path wandered maybe yards down into a narrow wash and then up its sand-and-gravel bottom toward the wall of the mesa from which Leaphorn had watched the commune two nights earlier.
Just under the mesa, an intermittent seep had produced a marshy spot. Some grazing leaser had drilled a shallow well, installed a windmill to pump a trickle of water into a sheep watering tank.
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