THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF


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 and
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 bloodhounds 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 colour
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.

About two miles from Summit was a little mountain, covered with a dense
cedar brake. On the rear elevation of this mountain was a cave. There
we stored provisions. One evening after sundown, we drove in a buggy
past old Dorset’s house. The kid was in the street, throwing rocks at a
kitten on the opposite fence.

“Hey, little boy!” says Bill, “would you like to have a bag of candy
and a nice ride?”

The boy catches Bill neatly in the eye with a piece of brick.

“That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars,” says Bill,
climbing over the wheel.

That boy put up a fight like a welter-weight cinnamon bear; but, at
last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away. We
took him up to the cave and I hitched the horse in the cedar brake.
After dark I drove the buggy to the little village, three miles away,
where we had hired it, and walked back to the mountain.

Bill was pasting court-plaster over the scratches and bruises on his
features. There was a fire burning behind the big rock at the entrance
of the cave, and the boy was watching a pot of boiling coffee, with two
buzzard tail-feathers stuck in his red hair. He points a stick at me
when I come up, and says:

“Ha! cursed paleface, do you dare to enter the camp of Red Chief, the
terror of the plains?

“He’s all right now,” says Bill, rolling up his trousers and examining
some bruises on his shins. “We’re playing Indian. We’re making Buffalo
Bill’s show look like magic-lantern views of Palestine in the town
hall. I’m Old Hank, the Trapper, Red Chief’s captive, and I’m to be
scalped at daybreak. By Geronimo! that kid can kick hard.”

Yes, sir, that boy seemed to be having the time of his life. The fun of
camping out in a cave had made him forget that he was a captive
himself. He immediately christened me Snake-eye, the Spy, and announced
that, when his braves returned from the warpath, I was to be broiled at
the stake at the rising of the sun.

Then we had supper; and he filled his mouth full of bacon and bread and
gravy, and began to talk. He made a during-dinner speech something like
this:

“I like this fine. I never camped out before; but I had a pet ’possum
once, and I was nine last birthday. I hate to go to school. Rats ate up
sixteen of Jimmy Talbot’s aunt’s speckled hen’s eggs. Are there any
real Indians in these woods? I want some more gravy. Does the trees
moving make the wind blow? We had five puppies. What makes your nose so
red, Hank? My father has lots of money. Are the stars hot? I whipped Ed
Walker twice, Saturday. I don’t like girls. You dassent catch toads
unless with a string. Do oxen make any noise? Why are oranges round?
Have you got beds to sleep on in this cave? Amos Murray has got six
toes. A parrot can talk, but a monkey or a fish can’t. How many does it
take to make twelve?”

Every few minutes he would remember that he was a pesky redskin, and
pick up his stick rifle and tiptoe to the mouth of the cave to rubber
for the scouts of the hated paleface. Now and then he would let out a
war-whoop that made Old Hank the Trapper shiver. That boy had Bill
terrorized from the start.

“Red Chief,” says I to the kid, “would you like to go home?”

“Aw, what for?” says he. “I don’t have any fun at home. I hate to go to
school. I like to camp out. You won’t take me back home again,
Snake-eye, will you?”

“Not right away,” says I. “We’ll stay here in the cave a while.”

“All right!” says he. “That’ll be fine. I never had such fun in all my
life.”

We went to bed about eleven o’clock. We spread down some wide blankets
and quilts and put Red Chief between us. We weren’t afraid he’d run
away. He kept us awake for three hours, jumping up and reaching for his
rifle and screeching: “Hist! pard,” in mine and Bill’s ears, as the
fancied crackle of a twig or the rustle of a leaf revealed to his young
imagination the stealthy approach of the outlaw band. At last, I fell
into a troubled sleep, and dreamed that I had been kidnapped and
chained to a tree by a ferocious pirate with red hair.

Just at daybreak, I was awakened by a series of awful screams from
Bill. They weren’t yells, or howls, or shouts, or whoops, or yawps,
such as you’d expect from a manly set of vocal organs—they were simply
indecent, terrifying, humiliating screams, such as women emit when they
see ghosts or caterpillars. It’s an awful thing to hear a strong,
desperate, fat man scream incontinently in a cave at daybreak.

I jumped up to see what the matter was. Red Chief was sitting on Bill’s
chest, with one hand twined in Bill’s hair. In the other he had the
sharp case-knife we used for slicing bacon; and he was industriously
and realistically trying to take Bill’s scalp, according to the
sentence that had been pronounced upon him the evening before.

I got the knife away from the kid and made him lie down again. But,
from that moment, Bill’s spirit was broken. He laid down on his side of
the bed, but he never closed an eye again in sleep as long as that boy
was with us. I dozed off for a while, but along toward sun-up I
remembered that Red Chief had said I was to be burned at the stake at
the rising of the sun. I wasn’t nervous or afraid; but I sat up and lit
my pipe and leaned against a rock.

“What you getting up so soon for, Sam?” asked Bill.

“Me?” says I. “Oh, I got a kind of a pain in my shoulder. I thought
sitting up would rest it.”

“You’re a liar!” says Bill. “You’re afraid. You was to be burned at
sunrise, and you was afraid he’d do it. And he would, too, if he could
find a match. Ain’t it awful, Sam? Do you think anybody will pay out
money to get a little imp like that back home?”

“Sure,” said I. “A rowdy kid like that is just the kind that parents
dote on. Now, you and the Chief get up and cook breakfast, while I go
up on the top of this mountain and reconnoitre.”

I went up on the peak of the little mountain and ran my eye over the
contiguous vicinity. Over toward Summit I expected to see the sturdy
yeomanry of the village armed with scythes and pitchforks beating the
countryside for the dastardly kidnappers. But what I saw was a peaceful
landscape dotted with one man ploughing with a dun mule. Nobody was
dragging the creek; no couriers dashed hither and yon, bringing tidings
of no news to the distracted parents. There was a sylvan attitude of
somnolent sleepiness pervading that section of the external outward
surface of Alabama that lay exposed to my view. “Perhaps,” says I to
myself, “it has not yet been discovered that the wolves have borne away
the tender lambkin from the fold. Heaven help the wolves!” says I, and
I went down the mountain to breakfast.

When I got to the cave I found Bill backed up against the side of it,
breathing hard, and the boy threatening to smash him with a rock half
as big as a cocoanut.

“He put a red-hot boiled potato down my back,” explained Bill, “and
then mashed it with his foot; and I boxed his ears. Have you got a gun
about you, Sam?”

I took the rock away from the boy and kind of patched up the argument.
“I’ll fix you,” says the kid to Bill. “No man ever yet struck the Red
Chief but what he got paid for it. You better beware!”

After breakfast the kid takes a piece of leather with strings wrapped
around it out of his pocket and goes outside the cave unwinding it.

“What’s he up to now?” says Bill, anxiously. “You don’t think he’ll run
away, do you, Sam?”

“No fear of it,” says I. “He don’t seem to be much of a home body. But
we’ve got to fix up some plan about the ransom. There don’t seem to be
much excitement around Summit on account of his disappearance; but
maybe they haven’t realized yet that he’s gone. His folks may think
he’s spending the night with Aunt Jane or one of the neighbours.
Anyhow, he’ll be missed to-day. To-night we must get a message to his
father demanding the two thousand dollars for his return.”

Just then we heard a kind Of war-whoop, such as David might have
emitted when he knocked out the champion Goliath. It was a sling that
Red Chief had pulled out of his pocket, and he was whirling it around
his head.

I dodged, and heard a heavy thud and a kind of a sigh from Bill, like a
horse gives out when you take his saddle off. A niggerhead rock the
size of an egg had caught Bill just behind his left ear. He loosened
himself all over and fell in the fire across the frying pan of hot
water for washing the dishes. I dragged him out and poured cold water
on his head for half an hour.

By and by, Bill sits up and feels behind his ear and says: “Sam, do you
know who my favourite Biblical character is?”

“Take it easy,” says I. “You’ll come to your senses presently.”

“King Herod,” says he. “You won’t go away and leave me here alone, will
you, Sam?”

I went out and caught that boy and shook him until his freckles
rattled.

“If you don’t behave,” says I, “I’ll take you straight home. Now, are
you going to be good, or not?”

“I was only funning,” says he sullenly. “I didn’t mean to hurt Old
Hank. But what did he hit me for? I’ll behave, Snake-eye, if you won’t
send me home, and if you’ll let me play the Black Scout to-day.”

“I don’t know the game,” says I. “That’s for you and Mr. Bill to
decide. He’s your playmate for the day. I’m going away for a while, on
business. Now, you come in and make friends with him and say you are
sorry for hurting him, or home you go, at once.”

I made him and Bill shake hands, and then I took Bill aside and told
him I was going to Poplar Cove, a little village three miles from the
cave, and find out what I could about how the kidnapping had been
regarded in Summit. Also, I thought it best to send a peremptory letter
to old man Dorset that day, demanding the ransom and dictating how it
should be paid.

“You know, Sam,” says Bill, “I’ve stood by you without batting an eye
in earthquakes, fire and flood—in poker games, dynamite outrages,
police raids, train robberies and cyclones. I never lost my nerve yet
till we kidnapped that two-legged skyrocket of a kid. He’s got me
going. You won’t leave me long with him, will you, Sam?”

“I’ll be back some time this afternoon,” says I. “You must keep the boy
amused and quiet till I return. And now we’ll write the letter to old
Dorset.”

Bill and I got paper and pencil and worked on the letter while Red
Chief, with a blanket wrapped around him, strutted up and down,
guarding the mouth of the cave. Bill begged me tearfully to make the
ransom fifteen hundred dollars instead of two thousand. “I ain’t
attempting,” says he, “to decry the celebrated moral aspect of parental
affection, but we’re dealing with humans, and it ain’t human for
anybody to give up two thousand dollars for that forty-pound chunk of
freckled wildcat. I’m willing to take a chance at fifteen hundred
dollars. You can charge the difference up to me.”

So, to relieve Bill, I acceded, and we collaborated a letter that ran
this way:

_Ebenezer Dorset, Esq.:_

    We have your boy concealed in a place far from Summit. It is
    useless for you or the most skilful detectives to attempt to find
    him. Absolutely, the only terms on which you can have him restored
    to you are these: We demand fifteen hundred dollars in large bills
    for his return; the money to be left at midnight to-night at the
    same spot and in the same box as your reply—as hereinafter
    described. If you agree to these terms, send your answer in writing
    by a solitary messenger to-night at half-past eight o’clock. After
    crossing Owl Creek, on the road to Poplar Cove, there are three
    large trees about a hundred yards apart, close to the fence of the
    wheat field on the right-hand side. At the bottom of the
    fence-post, opposite the third tree, will be found a small
    pasteboard box.
    The messenger will place the answer in this box and return
    immediately to Summit.
    If you attempt any treachery or fail to comply with our demand as
    stated, you will never see your boy again.
    If you pay the money as demanded, he will be returned to you safe
    and well within three hours. These terms are final, and if you do
    not accede to them no further communication will be attempted.
