"'Done!' I said.
"'Then that's about all,' says he, taking his feet off the table and looking at his watch. 'Half profits for each, and I'm to say when the proposition's worked out.'"
Mr. James Morris, as he chose to call himself, late of Merton (or Corpus Christi) College, Oxford, knocked the ash off his cigar and looked round the library.
"You've not got such a thing as a large scale map of Mexico, have you?" he asked. "Well, it doesn't matter. I guess the places would mostly be only names to you. We started West—Gonsalo way—and we worked some. Living Springs was our first success, and we let the Southern Combine have an option on that so as we could buy plant for the St. Esmond concession, and six months' working of St. Esmond gave us capital to buy out the Gonsalo Development Syndicate and round off our holding. Since then we've struck oil at Pica, Melango and Long Valley."
He paused considerately to let the unfamiliar names sink into my memory.
"In eighteen months we've never looked back," he went on, with rising enthusiasm. "Every dollar we made went back to the business—barring what we needed to live on, and that was mostly bread, meat and tobacco, with an occasional new pair of boots or breeches to keep us decent. And then three months ago we started prospecting in new territory—I can't tell you where it is, 'cos we're still negotiating. I found the oil, and O'Rane did the rest. He thinks it's the richest thing we've ever struck and he's going to collar the proposition. The territory's about the size of Scotland, and the concession will run to anything between one and two million dollars."
He pulled an envelope from his pocket and scribbled some figures on the back.
"We're selling our shirts to get it," he told me. "O'Rane never borrows money, but he's sent me over here to float a company to buy everything we've found or made in the last year and a half. He couldn't come himself: the sweepings of God's universe that we call our labour would be drunk by ten and knifing each other by ten-thirty without him to get a cinch on 'em. If I bring it off, we shall have enough for the concession. Maybe it won't pan out as rich as we hope, and then we start again at the bottom. That's the sort of risk he loves taking. That's—that's just O'Rane. Maybe he's right, and there's oil enough to flood Sahara. Put the concession at a million dollars and the average yield at ten per cent on your capital. A hundred thousand dollars per annum—gross. Take half of that away for working expenses—fifty thousand, net. Half profits on that, twenty-five thousand dollars a year—£5000 for each of us.
"O'Rane says he'll be satisfied with that. When we touch total net profit of fifty thousand dollars, he'll sell out or turn the proposition over to a company. Then he'll come back to England and go into Parliament and cut a dash. And I—well, I'll have to say good-bye to him, I guess."
He stopped abruptly as though there were much more that he would have liked to say. We sat smoking in silence for a few moments. Morris's raw, ill-regulated susceptibilities had made him an easy victim to Raney's personality: perhaps he was already wondering what to do when the strange partnership dissolved, and Raney returned alone—perhaps he recognized his own inability to continue the work single-handed when the inspiration and driving force were removed: perhaps, as his eyes glanced out on the silence and desolation of Knightsbridge, he was weighing the possibility of starting afresh and making a new home for himself in a Western capital.