CHAPTER XXIX.

THE ABBE’S LEGACY.

Life was easy at Quipai, and we were free from care.  On the other hand, we had so much to do that time sped swiftly, and though we were sometimes tired we were never weary.  The abbe made me the civil governor of the mission, and gave orders that I should be as implicitly obeyed as himself.  My duties in this capacity, though not arduous, were interesting, including as they did all that concerned the well-being of the people, the maintenance of the azequia, and the irrigation of the oasis.  My leisure hours were spent in study, working in the abbe’s laboratory, and with Angela, who nearly always accompanied me on my excursions to the head of the aqueduct which, as I have already mentioned was at the foot of the snow-line, two days’ journey from the valley lake.

It was during one of these excursions that we planned our new home, a mountain nest which we would have all to ourselves, and whither at the height of summer we might escape from the heat of the oasis, for albeit the climate of Quipai was fine on the whole, there were times when the temperature rose to an uncomfortable height.  The spot on which we fixed was a hollow in the hills, some two miles beyond the crater reservoir and about eight thousand feet above the level of the sea.  By tapping the azequia we turned the barren valley into a garden of roses, for in that rainless region water was a veritable magician, whatsoever it touched it vivified.  This done we sent up timber, and built ourselves a cottage, which we called Alta Vista, for the air was superb and the view one of the grandest in the world.

Angela would fain have persuaded the abbe to join us; yet though I made a well-graded road and the journey was neither long nor fatiguing he came but seldom.  He was so thoroughly acclimatized that he preferred the warmth of San Cristobal to the freshness of Alta Vista, and the growing burden of his years indisposed him to exertion, and made movement an effort.  We could all see, and none more clearly than himself, that the end was not far off.  He contemplated it with the fortitude of a philosopher and the faith of a Christian.  For the spiritual wants of his people he provided by ordaining (as in virtue of his ecclesiastical rank he had the right to do), three young men, whom he had carefully educated for the purpose; the reins of government he gave over entirely to me.

“I have lived a long life and done a good work, and though I shall be sorry to leave you, I am quite content to go,” he said one day to Angela and me.  “It is not in my power to bequeath you a fortune, in the ordinary sense of the word, for money I have none, yet so long as the mission prospers you will be better off than if I could give you millions.  But everything human is ephemeral and I cannot disguise from myself the possibility of some great disaster befalling you.  Those mountains contain both gold