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. Occasionally one of these authentic liars of the West falls a prey to his own lying. Frank Root (_The Overland Stage to California_) relates that one time after a Gargantuan story-teller named Ranger Jones had finished narrating a particularly blood-curdling “personal experience,” a stage driver who happened to be among the listeners looked him squarely in the eye and said, “I hope, Ranger Jones, that you don’t expect me to believe this story.” “Well--er--no--really, I don’t,” the narrator answered. “The fact is, I have lied out here in this Western country so long and have been in the habit of telling so many damned lies, the truth of it is now that I don’t know when I can believe myself.” In _Trails Plowed Under_ Charles M. Russell has a delicious chapter on “Some Liars of the Old West.” “These men weren’t vicious liars,” he comments. “It was love of romance, lack of reading matter, and the wish to be entertainin’ that makes ’em stretch facts and invent yarns.” Among the most famous of these liars was a man known as Lyin’ Jack, and his favorite tale was on an elk he once killed that had a spread of antlers fifteen feet wide. He always kept these, as he told the story, in the loft of his cabin. One time after a long absence Lyin’ Jack showed up in Benton. “The boys” were all glad to see him and, after a round or two of drinks, asked him for a yarn. “No, boys,” said Jack, “I’m through. For years I’ve been tellin’ these lies--told ’em so often I got to believin’ ’em myself. That story of mine about the elk with the fifteen-foot horns is what cured me. I told about that elk so often that I knowed the place I killed it. One night I lit a candle and crawled up in the loft to view the horns--an’ I’m damned if they weren’t there.”