Perfect Story

Newsgatherers were humbly attentive, last week at Mexico City, when a "perfect story," pristine, dramatic, significant, was told in staccato sentences by a tall, exhausted, emaciated U. S. citizen.

Story: ". . . Four bandits were guarding me. Their rifles lay across their knees. It was night. I pretended to be asleep. They began to doze. I waited until they were sound asleep. Then I got up with a piece of steel rod in one hand and a broken bottle in the other. I brained the first man near me, slashed the throat of the second one with the broken bottle and laid about with the steel rod. My aim was good. I stretched the other two out and then slit their throats. . . . After that I did a dash for the underbrush. . . . By this time the rest of the bandits began shooting. . . . I never dared to stop for a single moment. . . . I had a pretty good idea of the country and I made for Cuernavaca. I got there, all in, but safe" (Then motored to Mexico City). . . .

The teller of this tale was Mr. Lyman Fay Barber, Engineer of the Monte Carlo Mine in the State of Mexico.*

For a day, last week, most U. S. newspapers made of him a hero, told thrillingly of his capture by bandits a month ago, agonized over his sufferings, lauded his quadruple murder. Then General Ortiz, Chief of Military Operations in the State of Mexico, made known the result of an investigation which he had promptly ordered when Hero Barber reached Mexico City. Said General Ortiz, contemptuously, "I always believed that only in Hollywood were such interesting stories evolved as that of Lyman Barber. . . . All that Barber actually did was to offer his guards money, which they accepted with pleasure, and then guided him to safety. . . . Such people as Barber always talk too much."

* One of the 32 states, districts & territories of the United States of Mexico.