“I grew up to be cautious enough in business, though,” said the other, shaking his head gravely.  “I haven’t been able to afford not being careful.”  He adjusted the map—­a prefatory gesture.  “Now, I’ll make this whole affair perfectly clear to you.  It’s a simple matter, as are most big things.  I’ll begin by telling you of Moliterno—­he’s been my most intimate friend in that part of the continent for a great many years; since I went there as a boy, in fact.”

He sketched a portrait of his friend, Prince Moliterno, bachelor chief of a historic house, the soul of honour, “land-poor”; owning leagues and leagues of land, hills and mountains, broken towers and ruins, in central Basilicata, a province described as wild country and rough, off the rails and not easy to reach.  Moliterno and the narrator had gone there to shoot; Corliss had seen “surface oil” upon the streams and pools; he recalled the discovery of oil near his own boyhood home in America; had talked of it to Moliterno, and both men had become more and more interested, then excited.  They decided to sink a well.

Corliss described picturesquely the difficulties of this enterprise, the hardships and disappointments; how they dragged the big tools over the mountains by mule power; how they had kept it all secret; how he and Moliterno had done everything with the help of peasant labourers and one experienced man, who had “seen service in the Persian oil-fields.”

He gave the business reality, colouring it with details relevant and irrelevant, anecdotes and wayside incidents:  he was fluent, elaborate, explicit throughout.  They sank five wells, he said, “at the angles of this irregular pentagon you see here on the map, outlined in blue.  These red circles are the wells.”  Four of the wells “came in tremendous,” but they had managed to get them sealed after wasting—­he was “sorry to think how many thousand barrels of oil.”  The fifth well was so enormous that they had not been able to seal it at the time of the speaker’s departure for America.

“But I had a cablegram this morning,” he added, “letting me know they’ve managed to do it at last.  Here is, the cablegram.”  He handed Richard a form signed “Antonio Moliterno.”

“Now, to go back to what I said about not `daring’ to speak of this in Naples,” he continued, smiling.  “The fear is financial, not physical.”

The knowledge of the lucky strike, he explained, must be kept from the “Neapolitan money-sharks.”  A third of the land so rich in oil already belonged to the Moliterno estates, but it was necessary to obtain possession of the other two thirds “before the secret leaks into Naples.”  So far, it was safe, the peasants of Basilicata being “as medieval a lot as one could wish.”  He related that these peasants thought that the devils hiding inside the mountains had been stabbed by the drills, and that the oil was devils’ blood.

“You can see some of the country people hanging about, staring at a well, in this kodak, though it’s not a very good one.”  He put into Richard’s hand a small, blurred photograph showing a spouting well with an indistinct crowd standing in an irregular semicircle before it.