In the short story, The Ransom of a Red Chief by William Sydney Porter, the author tells the story of two men who kidnap a boy and hold him for ransom. Sam and his partner Bill, “...had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and...needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois...,” (The Ransom of a Red Chief, Paragraph 3). This explains that for the scheme that they wanted to accomplish they needed extra money and came to the conclusion that a kidnapping would be an easy way to achieve their goal. This also demonstrates that the two men were quite confident in their abilities to receive the ransom. They also assumed that because, “The father was respectable and tight, a mortgage fancier
