THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF

BY

O. HENRY

This is a plot-story of the kind in which the American public delights.  The reader enjoys the humor due to situation, hyperbole, satire, and astounding verbal liberties to which the writer is given; but he enjoys even more the sharp surprise that awaits him in the plot.  He has prepared himself for a certain conclusion and finds himself entirely in the wrong.  Nevertheless, he admits that the ending is not illogical nor out of harmony with the general tone.  Bill and Sam subscribe themselves “Two Desperate Men,” but they are so characterized as to prepare us for their surrender of the boy on the father’s own terms.

It is interesting to know that O. Henry himself put slight value upon local color.  “People say that I know New York well!” he says.  “But change Twenty-third Street to Main Street, rub out the Flatiron Building and put in the Town Hall.  Then the story will fit just as truly elsewhere.  At least, I hope that is the case with what I write.  So long as your story is true to life, the mere change of local color will set it in the East, West, South, or North.  The characters in ‘The Arabian Nights’ parade up and down Broadway at midday, or Main Street in Dallas, Texas.”

THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF

[Footnote:  From “Whirligigs,” by O. Henry.  Copyright, 1910, by Doubleday, Page & Company.  Reprinted by special permission of Doubleday, Page & Company.]

It looked like a good thing:  but wait till I tell you.  We were down South, In Alabama—­Bill Driscoll and myself—­when this kidnapping idea struck us.  It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, “during a moment of temporary mental apparition”; but we didn’t find that out till later.

There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course.  It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious an self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.

Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois with.  We talked it over on the front steps of the hotel.  Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi-rural communities; therefore, and for other reasons, a kidnapping project ought to do better there than in the radius of newspapers that send reporters out in plain clothes to stir up talk about such things.  We knew that Summit couldn’t get after us with anything stronger than constables and, maybe, some lackadaisical blood-hounds and a diatribe or two in the Weekly Farmers’ Budget.  So, it looked good.

We selected for our victim the only child of a prominent citizen named Ebenezer Dorset.  The father was respectable and tight, a mortgage fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and forecloser.  The kid was a boy of ten, with bas-relief freckles, and hair the color of the cover of the magazine you buy at the news-stand when you want to catch a train.  Bill and me figured that Ebenezer would melt down for a ransom of two thousand dollars to a cent.  But wait till I tell you.