A shameless adaptation of O. Henry’s classis “The Ransom of Red Chief” (1907, copyright expired). Much of O. Henry’s prose I’ve altered little. You’ll spot what I’ve added by its nature, but as best I could, I’ve endeavored to retain O. Henry’s flair.

THE RANSOM OF RED PRINCESS

It looked like a good thing: but 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 till later.

There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel cake, and called Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.

Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois with. We talked it over on the front steps of the hotel. Philoprogenitiveness, 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. Summit couldn’t get after us with anything stronger than constables and, maybe, some lackadaisical bloodhounds and a diatribe or two in the Weekly Farmers Budget. So, it looked good.

We selected for our victim the only child of a prominent citizen named Ebenezer Dorset. The father was respectable and tight, a mortgage fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and foreclosure. The kid was a girl of thirteen years, with bas-relief freckles, and hair the color of the cover of the magazine you buy at the newsstand when you want to catch a train. Bill and myself figured that Ebenezer would melt down for a ransom of two thousand dollars to a cent. But wait till I tell you.

About two miles from Summit was a little mountain, covered with a dense cedar brake. On the rear elevation of this mountain was a cave. There we stored provisions.

One evening after sundown we drove in a buggy past old Dorset’s house. The kid, a reed-haired girl. was in the street, across the opposite fence, throwing rocks at a cat.

“Hello, miss!” calls out Bill, “might you care for bag of candy?” t which she looks up from her doings.

“You’ll have to fight me, buster! You’re a kidnapper from out of town.”

That kid put up a battle like a welterweight cinnamon bear; but, at last, we got her down in the bottom of our buggy and drove away.

“Git me something for a pillow,” demanded our captive from under the blanket, “or I’ll call and alert the public!”

We took her up to the cave, and I hitched the horse in the cedar brake. After dark I drove the buggy to the little village, some miles away, where we had hired it, and walked back to the mountain.

Bill was pasting court-plaster over the scratches and bruises on his features. There was a fire burning behind the big rock at the entrance of the cave, and the girl was boiling a pot of coffee, with two buzzard tail-feathers stuck in her hair. She points a stick at me when I come up, and says. “Ha! cursed paleface, do you dare to enter the camp of Red Princess, the terror of the plains?”

“She’s all right now,” says Bill, rolling up his trousers and examining the bruises on his shins. “We’re making Buffalo Bill’s show look like magic-lantern views of Palestine in the town hall. I’m Old Hank, the Trapper, Red Princess’s captive, and I’m to be scalped at daybreak. By Geronimo, that kid can kick hard.”

Yes, sir, that girl seemed to be having the time of her life, the fun of camping out in a cave making her forget that she was our captive. She immediately christened me Snake-eye, and announced that, when her squaws returned from the warpath, I was to be broiled at the stake at the rising of the sun.

Then we had supper; and she filled her mouth full of bacon and bread and gravy, and began to talk a during-dinner speech something like this:

“I like this fine. I never camped out before; but I had a pet ‘possum once, and I was thirteen last birthday. I hate going to school. Rats ate up sixteen of Jimmy Talbot’s aunt’s speckled hen’s eggs. Are there any real Indians in these woods?

“I want some more gravy. Does the trees moving make the wind blow? We had five puppies. What makes your nose so red, Hank? My father has lots of money. Are the stars hot? I whipped Ed Walker twice, Saturday. I don’t much like boys. You dassent catch toads unless with a string. Do oxen make any noise? Why are oranges round? Have you got beds to sleep on in this cave? Amos Murray has got six toes. A parrot can talk, but a monkey or a fish can’t. How many does it take to make twelve?”

Every few minutes she would remembrance that she was a pesky redskin, and pick up her stick rifle and tiptoe off to check for the scouts of the hated paleface. Now and then she would let out a war-whoop that made Old Hank the Trapper shiver. That little gal had Bill terrorized from the start.

“Miss Red Princess,” say I to the kid, “would you like to go home?”

“Aw, what for?” says she. “I don’t have no fun at home. I hate to go to school. I like to camp out. You won’t take me back home again, Snake-eye, will you?”

“Not right away,” says I. “We’ll stay here in the cave awhile until they pay up.”

“All right!” says she. “That’ll be fine. I never had such fun in all my life.”

We went to bed about eleven o’clock, some blankets and quilts and the Red Princess between us where she kept us awake for three hours, jumping up and reaching for her rifle and screeching: “Hist! partner,” in mine and Bill’s ears, as the fancied crackle of a twig or the rustle of a leaf revealed to her imagination the stealthy approach of enemy.

The more disconcerting aspect of bedding beside her was her scooting herself against me to where my arm got wrapped about her front. Add to that the times where her leg encountered the most northern part of mine. Not that I much noticed, of course, but her dress, being not of the winter fashion, her female parts under it were recognizable by form.

At last I fell asleep and dreamt that I’d been kidnapped and chained to a tree by a girl pirate with red hair.

Just at daybreak I was awakened by a series of awful screams from Bill. They weren’t yells, or howls, or shouts, or whoops, or yawps, such as you’d expect from a manly set of vocal organs they were simply indecent, terrifying, humiliating screams, such as women emit when they see ghosts or caterpillars. It’s an awful thing to hear a strong, desperate, fat man scream incontinently in a cave at daybreak.

I jumped up to see what the matter was. Red Princess was sitting on Bill’s chest, with one hand twined in his hair. In the other she had the sharp case-knife we used for slicing bacon; and she was industriously and realistically trying to take Bill’s scalp, according to the sentence that had been pronounced upon him the evening before.

I got the knife away from the kid and made her lie down again. But from that moment Bill’s spirit was broken. He laid down on his side of the bed, but he never closed an eye again in sleep as long as that girl was with us. I dozed off for a while, but along toward sun-up I remembered that Red Princess had said I was to be burned at the stake at the rising of the sun. I wasn’t nervous or afraid; but I sat up and lit my pipe and leaned against a rock.

“What you getting up so soon for, Sam?” asked Bill.

“Me?” says I. “Oh, I got a kind of a pain in my shoulder. I thought sitting up would rest it.”

“You’re a liar!” says Bill. “You was to be burned at sunrise, and you was afraid she’d do it. And she would, too, if she could find a match. Ain’t it awful, Sam? Do you think anybody will pay out money to get a little imp like that back home?”

“Sure,” says I. “A poorly -behaved kid like that is the very kind that parents dote on. Now, you and the Princess get up and cook breakfast, while I go up on the top of this mountain and reconnoiter.”

I went up on the peak of the little mountain and ran my eye over the contiguous vicinity. Over toward Summit I expected to see the sturdy yeomen of the village armed with scythes and pitchforks beating the countryside for the dastardly kidnappers. But what I saw was a peaceful landscape dotted with one man plowing with a dun mule. Nobody was dragging the creek; no couriers dashed hither and yon, bringing tidings of no news to the distracted parents. There was a sylvan attitude of somnolent sleepiness pervading that section of the external outward surface of Alabama that lay exposed to my view.

“Perhaps,” says I to myself, “it has not yet been discovered that the wolves have borne away the tender lambkin from the fold,” and proceeded down the mountain to breakfast.

When I got to the cave I found Bill backed up against the side of it, breathing hard, and the girl threatening to smash him with a rock half as big as a coconut.

“She put a red-hot boiled potato down my back,” explained Bill to me, “and then mashed it with her foot; and I boxed her ears. Have you got a gun about you, Sam?”

I took the rock away from the girl and kind of patched up the argument. “I’ll fix you!” says the kid to Bill. “No man ever yet struck the Red Princess but what he got paid for it. You best beware!”

After breakfast the kid takes a piece of leather with strings wrapped around it out of her pocket and goes outside the cave unwinding it.

“What’s she up to now?” says Bill with a margin anxiously. “You don’t think she’ll run away, do you, Sam?”

“No fear of it,” says I. “Her don’t seem to be much of a homebody. But we’ve got to fix up some plan about the ransom. There don’t seem to be much excitement around Summit on account of her disappearance: but maybe they haven’t caught that she’s gone. Her folks may think she’s spending the night with Aunt Jane or one of the neighbors. Anyhow, she’ll be missed today. Tonight we must get a message to her father demanding the two thousand dollars.”

Just then we heard a kind of war-whoop, such as David might have emitted when he knocked out the champion Goliath. It was a sling that Red Princess had pulled out of her pocket, and she was whirling it around her head.

I dodged, and heard a heavy thud and a kind of a sigh from Bill like a horse gives out when you take his saddle off. A rock the size of an egg had caught him just behind his left ear. He loosened himself all over and fell in the fire across the frying pan of hot water for washing the dishes. I dragged him out and poured cold water on his head for half an hour.

By and by, Bill sits up and feels behind his ear and says, “Sam, do you know who my favorite Biblical character is?”

“Take it easy.” says I. “You’ll come to your senses presently.”

“King Herod,” says he “You won’t go away and leave me here alone, will you, Sam?”

I went out and caught that girl. “If you don’t behave,” says I, “I’ll take you straight home. Now, are you going to be good, or not?”

“I was only funnin you,” says she, pulling out her collar to straighten it. “I didn’t mean to hit Old Bill, but why did he act so impolite? Everyone knows that kidnappers, when it’s a girl as old as me, take some liberties, but as long as nothing unwanted results of it, it’s not mentioned in the trial.

“I’ll behave to your best satisfaction, Snake-eye, sir, if you won’t send me home and if you’ll let me play the Black Scout today. After we’re done, you can take advantage of having kidnapped me. Lucky for him you didn’t snatch me when I’m having my monthly.”

“I don’t know the game,” says I. “That’s for you and Mr. Bill to decide. He’s your playmate for the day. I’m going away for a while on nefarious business. Now, you come in and make friends with him and say you are sorry for hurting him, or home you go.”

I made her and Bill shake on it, and then I took Bill aside and told him I was going to Poplar Cove, a little village three miles from the cave, and find out what I could about how the kidnapping had been regarded in Summit. Also, to send a peremptory letter to old man Dorset that day, demanding the ransom and dictating how it should be paid.

“You know, Sam,” says Bill. “I’ve stood by you without batting an eye in earthquakes, fire, and flood, in poker games, dynamite outrages, police raids, train robberies, and cyclones. I never lost my nerve yet till we kidnapped that two-legged skyrocket of a kid. She’s got me going. You won’t leave me long with her, will you, Sam?”

“I’ll be back some time this afternoon,” says I. “You must keep her amused and quiet till I return. And now we’ll write the letter to old Dorset.”

Bill and I got paper and pencil and worked on the letter while Red Princess, with a blanket wrapped around her, strutted up and down, guarding the mouth of the cave. Bill begged me tearfully to make the ransom fifteen hundred dollars instead of two thousand. “I ain’t attempting,” says he, “to decry the celebrated moral aspect of parental affection, but we’re dealing with humans, and it ain’t human for anybody to give up two thousand dollars for that forty-pound chunk of freckled wildcat. I’m willing to take a chance at fifteen hundred dollars. You can charge the difference up to me.”

To relieve Bill, I acceded, and we collaborated a letter that ran this way:

“EBENEZER DORSET, ESQ.:

“We have your sweet little girl concealed in a place far from Summit. It is useless for you or the most skillful detectives to attempt to find her. Absolutely, the only terms on which you can have her restored to you are these: We demand fifteen hundred dollars in large bills for his return: the money to be left at midnight to-night at the same spot and in the same box as your reply as hereinafter described. If you agree to these terms, send your answer in writing by a solitary messenger tonight at half-past eight o’clock. After crossing Owl Creek, on the road to Poplar Cove, there are three large trees about a hundred yards apart, close to the fence of the wheat field on the right-hand side. At the bottom of the fence-post, opposite the third tree, will be found a small pasteboard box.

“The messenger will place the answer in this box and return immediately to Summit.

“If you attempt any treachery or fail to comply with our demand as stated, you will never see your precious little miss again.

“If you pay the money as demanded, she will be returned to you safe and well within three hours. These terms are final, and if you do not accede to them no further communication will be attempted.

“Two DESPERATE MEN (who are long separated from female companionship and may soon find themselves WITHOUT RECOURSE).”

The sign-off was designed by me, personally, to enhance the fright of Mrs. Dorset, if one be, as to the possibility that her daughter had been abducted by scoundrels with malintention. I addressed this letter and put it in my pocket, but as I was about to start, the kid comes up to me and says, “Aw, Snake-eye, you said I could play the Black Scout while you was gone.”

“Of course,” says I. “Mr. Bill will play with you. What kind of a game is it?”

“I’m the Black Scout,” says she, “and I have to ride to the stockade to warn the settlers that the Indians are coming.”

“What am I to do?” asks Bill, overhearing my concession and eyeing the kid suspiciously.

“You’re my hoss,” says now Black Scout. “How can I ride to the stockade without a hoss? Because of the weather I may have to ride bare-chested, once we get to a resting place.”

“You’d better keep her entertained,” says I to Bill, “till we get the scheme going.”

Bill gets down on his all fours, and a look comes in his eye like a rabbit’s when you catch it in a trap.

“How far is it to the stockade, kid?” he asks, in a husky manner of voice.

“Ninety miles,” says the Black Scout. “And you have to hump yourself to get me there on time. Whoa, now!” upon which up she jumps on Bill’s back and digs her heels in his side.

“For Heaven’s sake,” says Bill to me, “hurry back, Sam, soon as you can. I wish we hadn’t made the ransom more than a thousand,” and to his rider, “Say, you quit kicking me or I’ll get up and warm your backside good.”

“You’d have to wrestle me first, once we get to our resting place.”