"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."