And the Oh, Welcome to another episode of 1,001 Classic Short Stories and Tales, this time a satire from one of my favorite authors, O Henry. In the Ransom of Red Chief, two small-time thieves, Sam and Bill,

hatch a plot to kidnap a rich man's son and hold him for ransom, only to discover that

the boy is a holy terror and much more than they can manage.

As the famous comedian W.C. Fields once said,

never work with animals or children.

If you ever saw the movie Home Alone, the story of the two sympathetic and

bumbling thieves was probably inspired by the characters in O'Henry's The

Ransom of Red Chief and now our story the Ransom of Red Chief by

O Henry. It looked like a good thing but wait 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 until later.

There was a town down there as flat as a flannel cake and called summit of course. It contained

inhabitants of as undilliterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as

ever clustered around a maypole.

Bill and me had a joint capital of about $600 and we needed just $2,000 more to pull off a fraudulent

town lot scheme in Western Illinois whip.

We talked it over on the front steps of the hotel.

Phylo progenitiveness, 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

laxadasical bloodhounds and a diatribe or two in the weekly farmers budget. So it looked good. We selected for a victim the

only child of a prominent citizen named Ebenezer Dorset. The father was

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