A few weeks after my arrival I went to a fandango that was given for my special benefit. There was a great crowd there, and everybody was anxious to see the “Wild Texan,” as they called me. I was the lion of the evening, particularly for the young ladies, who never tired of asking me questions about Mexico, Texas, the Indians, prairies, etc. I at first answered truthfully all the questions they asked me; but when I found they evidently doubted some of the stories I told them which were facts, then I branched out and gave them some whoppers. These they swallowed down without gagging. For instance, one young woman wanted to know how many wild horses I had ever seen in a drove. I told her perhaps thirty or forty thousand.
“Oh, now! Mr. Wallace,” said she, “don’t try to make game of me in that way. Forty thousand horses in one drove! Well, I declare you are a second Munchausen!”[1]
“Well, then,” said I, “maybe you won’t believe me when I tell you there is a sort of spider in Texas as big as a peck measure, the bite of which can only be cured by music.”
“Oh, yes,” she answered, “I believe that’s all so, for I have read about them in a book.”
“Among other whoppers, I told her there was a varmint in Texas called the Santa Fé, that was still worse than the tarantula, for the best brass band in the country couldn’t cure their sting; that the creature had a hundred legs and a sting on every one of them, besides two large stings in its forked tail, and fangs as big as a rattlesnake’s. When they sting you with their legs alone, you might possibly live an hour; when with all their stings, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes; but when they sting and bite you at the same time, you first turn blue, then yellow, and then a beautiful bottle-green, when your hair all falls out, and your finger nails drop off, and in five minutes you are as dead as a door nail, in spite of all the doctors in America.”
“Oh! My! Mr. Wallace!” said she. “How have you managed to live so long in that horrible country?”
“Why, you see,” said I, “with my tarantula boots made of alligator skin, and my centipede hunting-shirt made of tanned rattlesnake hides, I have escaped pretty well; but these don’t protect you against the stinging scorpions, cow-killers, and scaly-back chinches, that crawl about at night when you are asleep! The only way to keep them at a distance is to chaw tobacco and drink whiskey, and that is the reason the Temperance Society never flourished much in Texas.”
“Oh!” said she, “what a horrible country that must be, where the people have to be stung to death, or else chaw tobacco and drink whiskey! I don’t know which is the worst.”
“Well,” said I, “the people out there don’t seem to mind it much; they get used to it after a while. In fact, they seem rather to like it, for they chaw tobacco and drink whiskey even in the winter time, when the cow-killers and stinging lizards are all frozen up!”
What gusto, what warmth of natural sympathy, what genial expansion! Here the authentic liar has been translated by circumstances and by his own genius into the pure aura of truth. There is no distortion, no “wrenching the true cause the wrong way,” no base intent to win by arousing false fears or to defraud through false hopes. The artist has but arranged the objects of his scene and then handed the spectator a magnifying glass that is flawlessly translucent. The magnified vision, like that of Tartarin of Tarascon, seems but the effect of a sunlight transilluminating all other sunlights—the sunlight of Tartarin’s Midi country, “the only liar in the Midi.” Only here it is the sunlight of the West, which brings mountain ranges a hundred miles away within apparent touching distance and through its mirages makes antelopes stalk as tall as giraffes, gives to buffalo bulls far out on the prairies the proportions of hay wagons, and reveals spired cities and tree-shadowed lakes reposing in deserts actually so devoid of life that not even a single blade of green grass can there be found.