About two miles from Summit was a little mountain, covered with a dense cedar brake. The kid was a freckle-faced boy of ten, with bright red hair, and Bill and me figured that Ebenezer would melt down for a ransom of two thousand dollars in a flash. The father was respectable and tight, a mortgage fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and forecloser. We selected for our victim the only child of a prominent citizen named Ebenezer Dorset. We knew that Summit couldn t get after us with anything stronger than constables and, maybe, some lackadaisical bloodhounds and a diatribe or two in the local paper. Family ties are strong in semirural communities, says we 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. We talked it over on the front steps of the hotel. 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 real estate deal in western Illinois with. It contained inhabitants of as harm less and selfsatisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered round a maypole.

There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course. It was, as Bill after ward expressed it, during a moment of temporary mental apparition but we didn t find that out till later. We were down South, in Alabama Bill Driscoll and myself when this kidnapping idea struck us. HENRY It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you.

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