Mr. Fortescue eBook

William Westall
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 334 pages of information about Mr. Fortescue.

Mr. Fortescue eBook

William Westall
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 334 pages of information about Mr. Fortescue.

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 great difference, and I should probably never turn to account those I had.  But the incident revived suspicions as to the good faith of the two castaways, which had been long floating vaguely in my mind.  From the first I had rather doubted the account they gave of themselves.  And Kidd!  I had never much liked him; he had a hard inscrutable face, and unless I greatly misjudged him was capable of bolder enterprises than petty larceny.  He was just the man to steal secretly away and return with a horde of unscrupulous treasure-seekers, for he knew now that there were diamonds in the neighborhood, and he must have heard that we had found gold and silver ornaments and vessels in the old cemetery—­

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Project Gutenberg
Mr. Fortescue from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.