"The Ransom of Red Chief," by O. Henry

In which a perfectly honest kidnapping scheme is ruined by a most obstreperous child, and our narrator is glad to be accenting now in the American South.



William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry, published "The Ransom of Red Chief" in The Saturday Evening Post in 1907, and then in his short story collection Whirligigs in 1910. It's since become one of the most well-known short comic stories in American literature, and even if you haven't read it before you've surely seen homages to it countless times without even realizing it.

I mention this in the recording, but I'll repeat it here: be aware that this story contains not only a portrayal of an early 1900s child playacting a Native American in a very early-1900s way, but also contains an actual racial slur. You know the one. It's used in a quick and frankly baffling manner, but it's there.

Now illustrations! As far as I could tell, there aren't any "original" illustrations, or at least none that I could find, so I've got a pair here from the Boy Scouts Book of Stories, published for the Boy Scouts of America by D. Appleton and Company in 1920. The line-drawing "decoration" up at the top of the post headed the story and was done by Arthur D. Scott, and the fully-painted illustration here was by Walter Louderback.

15:13 - The Black Scout jumps on Bill's
back and digs his heels in his side.

A couple of quick notes from the text: at 2:12, we are told that the entire motivating factor behind the kidnapping is to acquire funds for a "town-lot scheme." Near as I can tell, this is essentially the old "got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya" con, where they sell plots of land they don't quite have the rights to. My guess is that the money was to actually purchase a single plot of land and then sell it multiple times to different people.

A moment later, our loquacious narrator uses the wonderful word "philoprogenitiveness," which is the condition of either producing many offspring or of loving one's offspring, either of which would rather work in context.

Last, around 11:02 Bill says that his favorite Bible character is King Herod. This presumably refers not to the King Herod who challenged Jesus to walk across his swimming pool, but rather his father, Herod the Great, who was the King of Judea who, in the Gospel of Matthew, heard that a new "king of the Jews" was to be born in Bethlehem and thus ordered the deaths of all young boys in and around Bethlehem.

And that's it for this short story interlude! Check back soon for the start of our next book.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!