Summary
Narrated from the first-person, past-tense perspective of a criminal named Sam, “The Ransom of Red Chief” opens with Sam explaining how he and Bill Driscoll were in the southern U.S. state of Alabama when they had the idea to kidnap a wealthy man’s child and hold the boy for ransom. Sam says the kidnapping seemed like a good idea when it struck them, but he hints that it didn’t turn out as expected.
Sam comments that he and Bill were in a town called Summit, home to a self-satisfied and harmless population. Sam and Bill together have six hundred dollars but they want two thousand more to pull off a scheme in Western Illinois that requires buying a town lot. On the steps of a hotel, the men discuss the kidnapping plan. They believe semi-rural communities are likely to show love to their offspring and therefore a kidnapping will be successful. They also assume the town doesn’t have much in the way of police resources or newspaper reporters to track them down. Bill and Sam decide to kidnap the only child of Ebenezer Dorset, a respectable and wealthy local man. Dorset’s ten-year-old son is a freckled redhead. Bill and Sam are certain Dorset will pay two thousand dollars to have his son returned.
Bill and Sam store provisions in a cave hideout on a little cedar-covered mountain two miles from Summit. After sundown one evening they drive a buggy past Dorset’s house, out front of which is a kid throwing rocks at a kitten on a fence. Bill shouts to the boy, offering a bag of candy and a ride in the buggy. The boy throws a piece of brick at Bill, hitting Bill between the eyes. Bill climbs over the wheel, telling Sam that the brick throw will cost Dorset an extra five hundred dollars.
Sam comments that the boy put up a fight, comparing the boy to a boxing bear, but they get him in the buggy and drive to the cave, where they hitch their horse to a cedar tree. After dark, Sam returns the buggy to a village three miles away, where they had rented it, and walks back after returning it. At the cave, Bill applies medical plaster bandages to his scratches and bruises. The boy watches a pot of coffee boil over the fire at the cave entrance. Two buzzard tail-feathers stick out of his red hair. The boy points a stick at Sam and calls him a “cursed paleface,” asking him if he dares “to enter the camp of Red Chief, the terror of the plains.” Bill explains that they are “playing Indian.” Bill’s role is Old Hank, a trapper who has become Red Chief’s captive. Bill says he is going to be scalped in the morning, adding that the boy can kick hard.
Sam comments that the boy was having the time of his life in the cave: the fun of camping out makes the boy forget he is a captive. The boy names "Sam Snake-Eye the Spy," and threatens him with being burned on a stake when the boy’s braves return from the warpath. For dinner, they eat bacon, bread, and gravy. The boy makes a rambling speech of non-sequiturs, saying he has never camped, hates going to school, once had a pet possum, and doesn’t like girls. He also asks questions, wondering if the moving trees are what makes the wind blow, what makes Bill’s nose so red, whether stars are hot, why oranges are round, and whether there are any beds in the cave. Occasionally the boy remembers he is pretending to be a Native American and lets out a “warwhoop” that makes Bill, who has been terrorized by the boy, shiver.
Sam asks the boy if he wants to go home. The boy complains that he has no fun at home and hates school. He asks Sam not to bring him home again. Sam says they’ll stay in the cave a while. The boy is delighted and says he’s never had as much fun in his life. At eleven o’clock they go to bed on blankets and quilts. Sam and Bill put the boy between them. They are not afraid that he will run away. The boy keeps them awake for three hours. He keeps thinking he hears enemies coming and jumps up to reach for the stick he pretends is a rifle. Sam falls asleep eventually, troubled by a dream that he has been kidnapped by a pirate with red hair.
At daybreak, Sam wakes to Bill screaming in a way that he compares to the screams women let out when they see ghosts or caterpillars. Sam sees that the boy is sitting on Bill’s chest and is pulling Bill’s hair. With his other hand, he using Sam and Bill’s knife and setting out to cut off Bill’s scalp, as he had said he would the night before. Sam takes the knife and makes the boy lie down. Bill can’t fall asleep again but Sam dozes for a bit, thinking about how he was supposed to be burned at the stake at sunrise. He gets up before sunrise and lights his pipe. Bill asks why he is up so early and Sam says he has a pain in his shoulder and wanted to sit up. Bill calls Sam a liar and accuses Sam of being afraid the boy is really going to try to burn him.
Bill asks if Sam thinks anybody will pay to get someone like the boy home. Sam assures him that a rowdy boy like him is the kind that parents dote on. Sam asks Bill to make breakfast while he goes to the top of the mountain to see if he can gather any information. He expects to see villagers searching the countryside, armed with scythes and pitchforks, but instead sees a peaceful landscape with only a single man plowing his field with a mule. He wonders if maybe no one has realized they’ve kidnapped the boy yet. He returns to the cave.
Analysis
The opening line of “The Ransom of Red Chief” establishes the hindsight perspective of Sam, the story’s narrator and protagonist. In the line—“It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you”—Sam introduces the naïve overconfidence that led him and Bill, his partner in crime, to assume a kidnapping in a rural town would be easy. At the same time, the second clause hints that the men’s plans went awry. With this deceptively simple opening line, O. Henry subtly introduces the theme of hubris—an excessive overconfidence that precipitates one’s downfall—while simultaneously hinting at the ironic power reversal to come at the story’s end.
After choosing their target and preparing their cave hideout by stocking it with supplies, Sam and Bill rent a horse and buggy and go to abduct Ebenezer Dorset’s son, Johnny. They find the ten-year-old on the street, throwing rocks at a kitten—an image that foreshadows Johnny’s violent style of entertaining himself. The men's overconfidence in their plan, which involves luring the boy into their buggy with the promise of candy, is revealed as they find that Johnny doesn’t take the bait as expected but instead throws a piece of brick at Bill’s head. Despite the warning signs that Johnny will be more of a handful than anticipated, the men take him to their hideout.
Henry introduces the theme of make-believe after Sam returns from the town where he rented the horse and buggy. In his absence, Johnny has assumed the role of Red Chief, a Native American (“Indian” in the story) warrior. In an ironic reversal of the actual situation Johnny finds himself in, Johnny imagines that he has taken Bill and Sam hostage. Contrary to the reader’s expectation that Johnny would fear his captors, the boy seems not to understand that he has been kidnapped by strangers. Rather, he embraces the opportunity to camp out in a cave with two men who are willing to play along with his games of make-believe.
While the men seem to see no harm in entertaining Johnny by assuming the roles of Snake-eye and Old Hank, their sense of safety is threatened when they wake up to discover Johnny is actually trying to remove Bill’s scalp with a knife, as the boy had threatened before going to sleep. Although Sam pretends he has lost no confidence in his plan, he finds he cannot sleep while thinking about the possibility of Johnny actually trying to burn him at the stake. He also has a dream in which he has been kidnapped by a red-haired pirate—a nightmare figure informed by the red-headed Johnny. Now that both men fear the boy, Bill airs his concern that no one would want to pay a ransom to get back a boy as rowdy as Johnny. But rather than entertain Bill’s not-unfounded concern, Sam insists that they will be able to collect a ransom because Johnny is only like that because his parents have spoiled him, and so the parents are likely to be deeply concerned.
Sam’s faith in the kidnapping scheme is not even shaken when he goes to the top of the mountain and looks over the countryside to discover that the people of Summit are not desperately combing the landscape in search of Johnny. The moment foreshadows the revelation of Dorset’s indifference to having his son returned. But rather than accept the possibility that no one is looking for Johnny because his family doesn’t want him back, Sam assumes that word simply hasn’t gotten out yet. With Sam’s inability to see beyond his own confidence in the scheme paying off, the story touches again on the theme of hubris.
