Summary
A watercolor-hamlet, dozing under a quilt of apple-orchards and gossip, is jolted awake when Lester Crope—part-jester, part-town crier—cries that the dam has vomited its concrete guts. His alarm is fiction, yet it yanks Catherine Willis, the mayor’s porcelain niece, from the lip of real death; the village, embarrassed by its own gratitude, ships the fabulist to Dr. Mills’s Boston laboratory of decorum. Electro-tonics and brisk counsel cauterize Lester’s imagination, returning him as a walking truth-razor: he labels moldy bacon ‘archaeological’ and torpedoes a land-boom that would have plated the streets with gold. Commerce curdles, matrons swoon, aldermen howl; the physician, sensing a social evisceration, prescribes the oldest anesthesia—romance. Re-lofted as a railway clerk, Lester spies Catherine descending like a Pre-Raphaelite comet, and the old serpent of invention uncoils: tales of Arizona bandits, blazing six-guns, and moonlit posses spill from his tongue. The hamlet exhales; order, stitched with harmless lies, is restored.
Synopsis
Lester Crope, who has a penchant for inventing imaginative stories, alarms his village by reporting that the dam above the mayor's house has burst; incidentally he "saves" the life of Catherine Willis, the mayor's niece. The town council sends Lester to Dr. Mills of Boston to be treated for his condition. Now cured, his propensity for telling the truth on all occasions upsets village life: he works in a grocery store and informs customers of stale products; he also ruins a real-estate deal that would have meant prosperity for the town. Dr. Mills states that the only way to return Lester to his former safe tricks will be to arrange that he fall in love. Lester gets a job as railway ticket agent; seeing Catherine, the girl he loves, stepping from a train, he once again gets stirred up to start telling stories of hunting down bandits in Arizona. Once again he is a harmless liar.
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