O. Henry — two small-time crooks, one small boy, and the worst business plan in the history of crime.
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Each new word is hidden in a sentence. Read it aloud and say what you think the bold word means from the rest of the sentence — then reveal it and see how close you were.
Read each part. After it, there's a quick comprehension check (try the questions from memory first), then one thing to discuss.
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. There was a town down there, as flat as a pancake, called Summit. Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more for a business scheme. Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in small towns; a kidnapping project ought to do better there than anywhere.
We selected for our victim the only child of a prominent citizen named Ebenezer Dorset. The kid was a boy of ten, with a face full of freckles and hair the colour of the cover of a magazine you buy at the news-stand when you want to catch a train. Bill and me figured that Ebenezer would melt down for a ransom of two thousand dollars to a cent.
That boy put up a fight like a welter-weight cinnamon bear when we came by in the buggy; but at last we got him down in the bottom and drove away to a cave on a little mountain two miles from town. When I got back from hiding the buggy, the boy was watching a pot of boiling coffee, with two buzzard tail-feathers stuck in his red hair. He points a stick at me and says: "Ha! cursed paleface, do you dare to enter the camp of Red Chief, the terror of the plains?" That boy seemed to be having the time of his life. He immediately christened Bill "Old Hank, the Trapper," and announced that I was Snake-eye, the Spy, and that he would scalp me at daybreak.
1. Why do Sam and Bill decide to kidnap a child, and whose child do they choose?
2. How does Johnny react to being kidnapped?
1. They need two thousand dollars more for a business scheme and pick the only son of Ebenezer Dorset, a prominent citizen of Summit, Alabama.
2. He fights like a small bear at first — and then has the time of his life, turning the cave into a game where he is "Red Chief" and his kidnappers are his prisoners.
We went to bed about eleven o'clock. Just at daybreak, I was awakened by a series of awful screams from Bill. Red Chief was sitting on Bill's chest, with one hand twined in Bill's hair, and in the other the case-knife we used for slicing bacon — industriously and realistically trying to take Bill's scalp, according to the sentence pronounced upon him the evening before.
From that moment, Bill's spirit was broken. He never quite slept again while the boy was with us. During breakfast the kid put a red-hot boiled potato down Bill's back and mashed it with his foot; earlier he had dropped a rock the size of an egg on Bill's head from a tree. "He put a rock in that sling," groaned Bill, "and it ain't right for a boy to treat a grown person so." The strange thing was this: the boy refused to go home. "I never had such fun in all my life," says he. "You won't take me back home again, Snake-eye, will you?"
We wrote Ebenezer a letter demanding fifteen hundred dollars — Bill had argued me down from two thousand. "I ain't attempting," says he, "to slander 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." While I took the letter to the post, Bill was to keep the boy amused. When I came back, I found Bill flattened against the side of the cave, breathing hard, the boy threatening to smash him with a rock. "He rode me ninety miles to the stockade," Bill explained, "playing horse. I'm a grown person with masculine habits of self-defence, but there comes a time when all systems of self-respect collapse."
1. What does Red Chief do to Bill at daybreak, and what does it do to Bill's spirit?
2. Why do the kidnappers lower the ransom from two thousand to fifteen hundred dollars?
1. He sits on Bill's chest at dawn, genuinely trying to scalp him with the bacon knife. Bill never really sleeps again — his spirit is broken.
2. Bill argues that no human being would pay two thousand dollars for this particular child — the boy is worth less than they thought, in every sense.
The answer came that night. I walked to the tree, found the note, and read it to Bill by the lantern. It was written with a pen in a crabbed hand, and the sum and substance of it was this:
"Gentlemen: I received your letter about the ransom you ask for the return of my son. I think you are a little high in your demands, and I hereby make you a counter-proposition, which I am inclined to believe you will accept. You bring Johnny home and pay me two hundred and fifty dollars in cash, and I agree to take him off your hands. You had better come at night, for the neighbours believe he is lost, and I couldn't be responsible for what they would do to anybody they saw bringing him back. Very respectfully, EBENEZER DORSET."
"Great pirates of Penzance!" says I; "of all the impudent —" But I glanced at Bill and hesitated. He had the most appealing look in his eyes I ever saw on the face of a dumb or a talking brute. "Sam," says he, "what's two hundred and fifty dollars, after all? We've got the money. One more night of this kid will send me to a bed in Bedlam. I think Mr Dorset is a spendthrift for making us such a liberal offer." So we took Johnny home. It was just twelve o'clock when we knocked at Ebenezer's front door. Bill counted out two hundred and fifty dollars into Dorset's hand — and when the kid found out we were going to leave him at home, he started up a howl and fastened himself to Bill's leg like a leech. "How long can you hold him?" asks Bill. "I'm not as strong as I used to be," says old Dorset, "but I think I can promise you ten minutes." "Enough," says Bill. "In ten minutes I shall cross the Central, Southern and Middle Western States, and be legging it trippingly for the Canadian border." And, dark as it was, and fat as Bill was, and good a runner as I am, he was a good mile and a half out of Summit before I could catch up with him.
1. What is Ebenezer Dorset's counter-proposition?
2. How does the story end for Bill and Sam?
1. He will graciously take his own son back — if the kidnappers pay HIM two hundred and fifty dollars, delivered at night so the neighbours don't catch them.
2. They pay. Dorset holds the howling boy back for ten minutes, and fat Bill runs so fast he is a mile and a half out of town before Sam — a good runner — can catch him.
A phrasal verb is a verb plus a particle (up, out, down, off, back…) whose meaning is more than the sum of its parts — and they are everywhere in a caper story: plans are set up, ransoms are handed over, nerves give out, and criminals run off. Master a set of them here and your spoken English instantly sounds more natural.
Add the missing particle (up, out, off, down, over, with…).
1. Sam and Bill set on their scheme with six hundred dollars and total confidence.
2. Bill couldn't put up another night of Red Chief's games.
3. The boy wore Bill , one hot potato at a time.
4. In the end, they handed two hundred and fifty dollars — to the father.
1. set out · 2. put up with · 3. wore him down · 4. handed over
Replace the formal verb in brackets with a phrasal verb from today's ten, in the correct form.
1. Bill wanted to of the plan after the first night. (withdraw)
2. "!" Sam told the screaming boy. (become less excited)
3. When the door opened, Bill simply — at extraordinary speed. (departed suddenly)
4. They never once considered and going home empty-handed. (surrendering)
1. back out (inseparable: back out of the plan)
2. Calm down
3. took off
4. giving up
Fill each gap with a phrasal verb from today's ten, in the correct form. Read it aloud when you're done.
Two crooks on a simple scheme: kidnap a rich man's son and wait for the ransom. But the boy never needed to be , because he refused to leave. Night after night he his captors , until Bill could no longer the games. In the end it was the kidnappers who the money — and into the dark, with the boy's father holding his son back at the door.
set out · tied up · wore … down · put up with · handed over · ran off (or: took off)
Notice how the phrasal verbs carry the whole comic arc — from setting out to running off.
Keep these ten in your pocket — Task A in the Speak tab asks you to retell the story with them.
You have the story and the words. Now push the ideas outward — argue, disagree, change your mind. Do all of this out loud. There are no right answers here, only good reasons.
Stories where a scheme rebounds on the schemer — the trickster tricked, the biter bit — appear in every culture's folklore. Why do audiences enjoy this shape so much? Collect two or three examples from films, books or fables you know, and work out what they have in common.
On paper, the kidnappers hold all the cards. In reality, a ten-year-old and a calm father defeat them without lifting a finger. In any negotiation, what actually gives a person power — and what does Ebenezer Dorset understand about his position that Sam and Bill don't?
The whole plan fails because two adults assume a child is a passive object to be traded. What do adults routinely underestimate about children? Think of examples from school, sport, films or the news where a child outplayed the adults' script.
From this pair to the burglars in Home Alone, comedy adores criminals who are bad at their jobs. Why are incompetent villains loveable when competent ones are frightening? And is there a moral line — some crimes that comedy shouldn't touch? Where would you draw it?
This is the heart of the lesson — do all of it out loud. The timer is there to keep you going: fill the time with detail rather than escaping it.
Tell the story in your own words, as if to a friend who needs cheering up. Move through the arc: the scheme → the kidnapping → Red Chief's reign of terror → Bill's collapse → the ransom letter → Dorset's counter-offer → the payment and the sprint out of town.
Use at least four phrasal verbs from today's ten and five key words. Land the ending — the timing of the last line is everything.
Play it as a negotiation in two voices. First, be Sam: argue out loud, as persuasively as you can, why Dorset should pay the full fifteen hundred. Then be Ebenezer Dorset: calmly explain — in his beautifully polite business English — why the gentlemen will, in fact, be paying you. Which side has the stronger case, and why?
Invent your own comic caper: a plan that looks perfect on paper and collapses beautifully — a heist, a prank, a get-rich-quick scheme from a story or film, or one entirely from your imagination. Tell it with a straight face, use at least three phrasal verbs, and make sure the schemer ends up worse off than when they started.