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ing it. The evening of this same day there was a dance given by the Gordons in the ranchman candidate's big house opposite the Weatherfords' in Mesa Circle, and Blount went, hoping that Patricia would be there. She was there; and in the heart of the evening, when Blount had persuaded her to sit out a dance with him in a corner of the homelike reception-hall, he began to pry at a little stone of stumbling which was threatening to grow too large to be easily rolled aside. "I'm hunting a conscience to-night," he said, without preface. "Have you got one that you could lend me?" She laughed lightly. "You told me once that I had the New England conscience--which was the same as saying that I had enough for my own needs and a surplus to pass around among my friends. What bad thing have you been doing now?" He made a wry face. "It's the 'practical politics' again. Suppose I say that I have obtained positive evidence of a crime against the laws of the State and the nation. How far am I justified in suppressing, for a perfectly right and proper end, this evidence which would send a lot of people to jail?" "Mercy!" she exclaimed; "how you can bring a thunderbolt crashing down out of a perfectly clear sky! Is it ever justifiable to shield criminals and criminality?" "That is just what I'm trying to find out," he persisted. "At the present moment I am shielding a good handful of open lawbreakers. Some of them know what I'm doing, and some of them don't. Those who know have been told that they must be good or I'll publish the evidence, and they've promised to be good if I won't publish it. At the time I didn't question my right to make such a bargain, but--" "But now you are questioning it? What would happen if you should tell what you know?" "Chaos," he replied briefly. "May I ask who is implicated?" "A good half of the corporation officials in the State, and some few outside of it." "Mercy!" she said again. And then: "It's too big for me, Evan. I can only go back to first principles and ask if it is ever justifiable to do evil that good may come." "If you put it that way, I've made myself _particeps criminis_," he said gravely. "I have given my word to keep still if the lawbreaking deals are broken off at once and in good faith. Beyond that, I can't help knowing that the exposure which I have threatened to make, and could make, would practically turn the people of this State into a mob." She was sha
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