The Ransom of Red Chief It is funny how things do not always work out the way we expect them to. No matter how long we plan or how impossible we think something may be, it can still happen. Bill and Sam thought they had an easy job and easy money right in front of them. O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief” represents irony as the desperation of two men, a kid’s hellish imagination get the best of them, and the bond between father and son are over estimated.
Bill and Sam had only six hundred dollars between the both of them and they needed two thousand more to pull a scheme in Illinois. They had the bright idea to kidnap a kid and get the two thousand as a ransom. They wrote out the ransom note after having held the boy captive over night in a cave and they signed it “two desperate men.” Bill had been going out of his mind dealing with the boy’s wild imagination. He was about to break down and walk away without the money; he had enough. O. Henry:
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 even before (281.)
They were no longer desperate for the money but desperate to give the boy back. They lowered the ransom to only fifteen hundred because they realized no one would pay two thousand dollars for the return of “that forty-pound chunk of freckled wildcat” (283). They were camping out in a cave and since their arrival the boy had been playing Indian with Bill. The boy was Red Chief, Bill was Old Hank, and Sam was Snake-eye. Red Chief said Old Hank was to be “scalped at daybreak” and Snake-eye “broiled at the stake at the rising of the sun” (280). At first all seemed to be going well, the boy was having the most fun he had ever