Смешные рассказы / The Funny Stories - стр. 5

He was a man of habit.”

We sat in silence.

My friend stood up, took half-a-sovereign from his pocket, put it on the table and went out.

It looked like a good idea, but wait till I tell you. We were in Alabama – Bill Driscoll and I – when this kidnapping idea came to us. It was, as Bill expressed it later, “during a moment of temporary mental apparition[7]”; but we didn't find that out until later.

There was a town, as flat as a cake, and called Summit.

We had six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more. We talked about it on the front steps of the hotel. They love children a lot in rural communities; because of this and for other reasons, a kidnapping project is better here than in the place where newspapers can send reporters to talk about such things. We knew that Summit couldn't get after us with anything stronger than constables and maybe some bloodhounds and one or two articles in the “Weekly Farmers' Budget”. So, it looked good.

We selected for our victim the only child of a rich citizen named Ebenezer Dorset. The father was respectable. The kid was a boy of ten, with freckles, and hair the color of the cover of the magazine you buy when you are waiting for a train. Bill and I thought that Ebenezer could give a ransom of two thousand dollars. But wait till I tell you.

About two miles from Summit was a little mountain with a cave. We stored provision there. One evening after sundown, we drove past old Dorset's house. The kid was in the street, throwing rocks at a kitten on the opposite fence.

“Hey, little boy!” said Bill, “would you like to have a bag of candies and a nice ride?”

The boy threw a stone into the Bill's eye.

“That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars,” says Bill, climbing over the wheel.

We got him down in the bottom of the carriage and drove away. We took him up to the cave. After dark I drove the carriage to the little village, three miles away, where we hired it, and walked back to the mountain.

Bill was putting plaster over the scratches on his face. The boy was watching a pot of boiling coffee, with two feathers stuck in his red hair. He pointed a stick at me when I came up, and said:

“Ha! Paleface, do you dare to enter the camp of Red Chief?”

“We're playing Indians. I'm Old Hank, Red Chief's captive, and he is going to take my scalp!”, said Bill.

Yes, sir, that boy was having fun. He forgot that he was a captive. He called me Snake-eye, the Spy, and announced that when his men returned from the warpath, they were going to burn me at the stake.