again. Neither could there be any doubt that Kidd was the thief.
Besides my wife, myself, and one or two of our servants, no one else had
been in the room; and our own people would not have taken the trouble to
pick up a diamond from the ground, much less steal one from my house.

My first impulse was to accuse Kidd of the theft and have him searched.
And then I reflected that I was almost as much to blame as himself.
Assuming that he knew something of the value of precious stones, I had
exposed him to temptation by leaving so many and of so great value in an
open drawer. He might well suppose that I set no store by them, and that
half a dozen or so would never be missed. So I decided to keep silence for
the present and keep a watch on Mr. Kidd's movements. It might be that he
and Yawl were thinking to steal a march on me and sail away secretly with
the sloop, and perhaps something else. They had both struck up rather
close friendships with native women.

But as I did not want to lose any more of my diamonds, and there was no
place at Alta Vista where they would be safe so long as Kidd was on the
premises, I put them in a bag in the inside pocket of a quilted vest which
I always wore on my mountain excursions, my intention being to take them
on the following day down to San Cristobal and bestow them in a secure
hiding-place.

I little knew that I should never see San Cristobal again.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE QUENCHING OF QUIPAI.

The cottage at Alta Vista had expanded little by little into a long,
single storied flat-roofed house, shaded by palm-trees and set in a fair
garden, which looked all the brighter from its contrast with the brown and
herbless hill-sides that uprose around it.

In the after part of the day on which I discovered the theft, Angela and
myself were sitting under the veranda, which fronted the house and
commanded a view of the great reservoir, the oasis and the ocean. She was
reading aloud a favorite chapter in "Don Quixote," one of the few books we
possessed. I was smoking.

Angela read well; her pronunciation of Spanish was faultless, and I always
took particular pleasure in hearing her read the idiomatic Castilian of
Cervantes. Nevertheless, my mind wandered; and, try as I might, I could
not help thinking more of the theft of the diamonds than the doughty deeds
of the Don and the shrewd sayings of Sancho Panza. Not that the loss gave
me serious concern. A few stones more or less made no