“Here’s a large scale map that will refresh your memory.” He unfolded it and laid it across their knees; it was frayed with wear along the folds, and had been heavily marked and dotted with red and blue pencillings. “My millions are in this large irregular section,” he continued. “It’s the anklebone and instep of Italy’s boot; this sizable province called Basilicata, east of Salerno, north of Calabria. And I’ll not hang fire on the point, Lindley. What I’ve got there is oil.”
“Olives?” asked Richard, puzzled.
“Hardly!” Corliss laughed. “Though of course one doesn’t connect petroleum with the thought of Italy, and of all Italy, Southern Italy. But in spite of the years I’ve lived there, I’ve discovered myself to be so essentially American and commercial that I want to drench the surface of that antique soil with the brown, bad-smelling crude oil that lies so deep beneath it. Basilicata is the coming great oil-field of the world—and that’s my secret. I dare to tell it here, as I shouldn’t dare in Naples.”
“Shouldn’t `dare’?” Richard repeated, with growing interest, and no doubt having some vague expectation of a tale of the Camorra. To him Naples had always seemed of all cities the most elusive and incomprehensible, a laughing, thieving, begging, mandolin-playing, music-and-murder haunted metropolis, about which anything was plausible; and this impression was not unique, as no inconsiderable proportion of Mr. Lindley’s fellow-countrymen share it, a fact thoroughly comprehended by the returned native.
“It isn’t a case of not daring on account of any bodily danger,” explained Corliss.
“No,” Richard smiled reminiscently. “I don’t believe that would have much weight with you if it were. You certainly showed no symptoms of that sort in your extreme youth. I remember you had the name of being about the most daring and foolhardy boy in town.”
“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.
“Is this the Basilicatan peasant costume? asked Richard, indicating a figure in the foreground, the only one revealed at all definitely. “It looks more oriental. Isn’t the man wearing a fez?”
“Let me see,” responded Mr. Corliss very quickly. “Perhaps I gave you the wrong picture. Oh, no,” he laughed easily, holding the kodak closer to his eyes; “that’s all right: it is a fez. That’s old Salviati, our engineer, the man I spoke of who’d worked in Persia, you know; he’s always worn a fez since then. Got in the habit of it out there and says he’ll never give it up. Moliterno’s always chaffing him about it. He’s a faithful old chap, Salviati.”
“I see.” Lindley looked thoughtfully at the picture, which the other carelessly returned to his hand. “There seems to be a lot of oil there.”
“It’s one of the smaller wells at that. And you can see from the kodak that it’s just `blowing’—not an eruption from being `shot,’ or the people wouldn’t stand so near. Yes; there’s an ocean of oil under that whole province; but we want a lot of money to get at it. It’s mountain country; our wells will all have to go over fifteen-hundred feet, and that’s expensive. We want to pipe the oil to Salerno, where the Standard’s ships will take it from us, and it will need a great deal for that. But most of all we want money to get hold of the land; we must control the whole field, and it’s big!”
“How did you happen to come here to finance it?”
“I was getting to that. Moliterno himself is as honourable a man as breathes God’s air. But my experience has been that Neapolitan capitalists are about the cleverest and slipperiest financiers in the world. We could have financed it twenty times over in Naples in a day, but neither Moliterno nor I was willing to trust them. The thing is enormous, you see—a really colossal fortune—and Italian law is full of ins and outs, and the first man we talked to confidentially would have given us his word to play straight, and, the instant we left him, would have flown post- haste for Basilicata and grabbed for himself the two thirds of the field not yet in our hands. Moliterno and I talked it over many, many times; we thought of going to Rome for the money, to Paris, to London, to New York; but I happened to remember the old house here that my aunt had left me—I wanted to sell it, to add whatever it brought to the money I’ve already put in—and then it struck me I might raise the rest here as well as anywhere else.”
The other nodded. “I understand.”
