Summary
Sam walks to Poplar Cove and hangs around the post office and store. He chats with the “chawbacons” (hillbillies) who come in to trade. A man tells him that the town of Summit is upset because Dorset’s boy has disappeared or has been stolen. Sam comments in narration that this is all he wanted to know. Sam buys tobacco, posts his letter surreptitiously, and returns to the cave.
Bill and the boy are not at the cave, so Sam searches the area around it and risks shouting a couple times. After half an hour, Sam hears the bushes rustle and Bill walks out. The boy walks behind Bill, stepping softly and with a broad grin on his face. Bill stops, removes his hat, and wipes his face with a handkerchief. The boy stops eight feet behind him. Bill tells Sam that he couldn’t help it but he sent the boy home. Bill defends his decision by saying that martyrs “suffered death rather than give up the particular graft they enjoyed” but he says none of them were subjected to the same supernatural tortures Bill has been. Bill says he tried to follow through with their kidnapping plans, but he reached a limit.
Sam asks Bill what the trouble is. Bill explains that the boy rode him ninety miles to the stockade. When the settlers were rescued, the boy rewarded his horse with oats. Bill says sand isn’t a palatable substitute for oats. Bill then had to spend an hour fielding the boy’s ceaseless questions about why roads run two ways and what makes grass green. Bill says he took the boy and dragged him down the mountain. The boy kicked Bill’s shins and bit his hand. But, Bill says, the boy is gone: Bill brought him to the road, showed him the way home, and gave him a boot that sent him about eight feet on the way there. Bill apologizes for losing the ransom, but says it was either that or Bill Driscoll would go to the madhouse.
Sam comments that Bill puffs and blows to catch his breath, but there is a look of peace and growing contentment on his rose-pink face. Sam asks Bill if there is any heart disease in his family. Bill says there’s nothing chronic except malaria and accidents. Sam says then in that case Bill should turn and look behind himself. Bill turns and sees the boy, the color draining from his skin. He sits on the ground and plucks aimlessly at grass and little sticks. For an hour Sam is concerned about Bill’s mental state. Eventually Sam tells Bill his scheme and explains that they will get the ransom by midnight. Bill braces himself enough to give the boy a smile. Feeling a little better, Bill promises to play the Russian in a Japanese war game with the boy.
Sam’s scheme for collecting the ransom involves him hiding in the tree above the drop-off box. He gets in the tree at 8:30 that night, knowing that if police constables were watching from a way off they would expect to see someone cross the field to collect from the box. Eventually a teenage boy rides up on a bicycle and slips a folded piece of paper into the box before pedaling back toward Summit. Sam waits an hour until he concludes that no one is around to try to catch him. He slips down the tree, grabs the note, and walks back to the cave.
In the light of the lantern, Sam flips open the note to read it aloud to Bill. In the note, Dorset says he thinks they are a little high in their demands. He offers a counter proposition that the men bring Johnny home and pay him two hundred and fifty dollars in cash in exchange for him taking the boy off their hands. Dorset says they should come at night because the neighbors believe the boy is lost and he can't be held responsible for what they might do to the men if they saw the men bring him back.
Sam responds to the letter with disbelief and anger. However, Bill immediately starts reasoning with Sam, saying that they have the money to pay Dorset and one more night with the boy will send Bill to a mental hospital. Bill says he thinks Dorset is a gentleman and that his offer is generous. Bill says they shouldn’t let the chance go. Sam agrees, saying that the boy has got on his nerves, too. Sam says they’ll return him, pay the ransom, and make a getaway.
The men take the boy home that night, convincing him by saying that Dorset got the boy a silver-mounted rifle and a pair of moccasins; Sam and Bill promise they will hunt bears together the next day. The men knock on Dorset’s door at twelve o’clock. Sam comments that instead of them collecting fifteen hundred dollars, Bill counted two hundred and fifty into Dorset’s hand.
When the boy realizes the men are leaving him at home, he starts howling and grabs on to Bill’s leg, attached as tightly as a leech. Dorset peels his son away gradually, like he is removing a plaster bandage. Bill asks Dorset how long he can hold the boy. Dorset says he isn’t as strong as he used to be but he can promise ten minutes. Bill says it’s enough time: in ten minutes he will cross the United States and be running to make it to the Canadian border. The story closes with Sam commenting that even though it is dark, Bill is fat, and Sam is a good runner, Bill makes it a mile and a half out of Summit before Sam can catch up with him.
Analysis
Following through with the kidnapping-for-ransom plot, Sam manages to post his ransom letter at the Poplar Cove post office without attracting anyone’s attention. While there, he is also pleased to find out from a trader that news of Johnny’s disappearance has traveled. Sam is pleased by the news because he believes Dorset is more likely to pay the ransom if the townspeople of Summit are whipped up into a hysteria over the kidnapping.
Having regained confidence in his kidnapping scheme, Sam returns to the cave. However, in an instance of situational irony, Sam discovers that Bill and the boy are gone. Only after half an hour of searching does Bill emerge from the bushes and explain to Sam that he couldn’t handle looking after the boy any longer—particularly after the boy made him eat sand that Bill was meant to pretend was oats—and so he abandoned Johnny on the road back to Summit. Bill explains how Johnny bit him on the hands and kicked his shins because he didn’t want to be separated from Bill—ironic given that a ten-year-old boy ought to have been relieved to get away from a kidnapper.
As Bill explains himself to Sam, Bill doesn’t realize that Johnny has followed him back to the cave and is standing right behind him. In this instance of dramatic irony, Henry injects humor into the story by having Bill delight in his newfound freedom while Sam and the reader already know that Bill is not in fact free of Johnny yet. The ironic turn of events touches again on the themes of hubris and poetic justice.
After Bill recovers from the shock of discovering that Johnny followed him back to the cave, he agrees to play the Russian in a Japanese war game—a line that suggests Johnny has another sadistic game in store for Bill. With the plan back on track, Sam goes to collect the response to their ransom note from the spot he directed Dorset to send it. He waits in a tree at the spot for hours, convinced that Dorset might try to get the police involved, and only comes down once he is certain no one is going to try to catch him—a detail that foreshadows for the reader Dorset’s indifference to having Johnny back.
As Sam and Bill read Dorset’s reply to their ransom note, the story reaches its profoundly ironic climax: Knowing how difficult his son is to manage, Dorset tells the men their ransom demand is too high, and makes a counteroffer that involves them paying him $250 to take the boy back. While Sam responds with incredulity, it doesn’t take much for Bill to convince Sam that Dorset’s offer is not insulting but generous, and that they ought to take the deal while they can. Sam finally overcomes the hubris that has blinded him throughout the story to the flaws in his scheme, and he concedes that they should take Dorset’s deal.
The story ends with Bill and Sam running out of town after having completed the kidnapping-for-ransom deal. However, in O. Henry’s comic reimagining of a kidnapping-for-ransom plot, rather than being paid to give the captive boy back, the men have had to pay the boy’s father to hold him back. And rather than running to evade the authorities, Bill and Sam are running to put as much distance as they can between themselves and the boy. This ironic reversal in fortunes cements the theme of poetic justice, showing how the men’s crime has been punished with the perfect retribution: becoming traumatized by the boy they kidnap and having to pay to get him out of their lives.
