Soapy's main conflict is wanting to get arrested and not being able to achieve his objective. A conflict arises from a motivation. The protagonist's motivation is strong. He has to find shelter for the winter or he will freeze to death. His only antagonists, or opponents, are the police. He can't get a cop to arrest him in spite of doing some outrageous things. Therefore we can say that the conflict is man against man, Soapy against the New York police.

It is ironic that he does finally achieve his objective after he has decided to reform. The author's intended message is apparently that it is very hard to reform after a person has gone down the wrong path for a long time. The story is similar in some respects to O. Henry's "A Retrieved Reformation." After Jimmy Valentine falls in love and decides to go straight, he is in serious danger of having his past catch up with him. It looks as if he will be arrested by Ben Price and sentenced to a long term in prison for the three burglaries he committed after being pardoned.

O. Henry himself served several years in prison for embezzlement and was always haunted by the experience and the disgrace. This probably accounts for the fact that he wrote under an assumed name and became such a heavy drinker that he was consuming two quarts of whiskey every day. He died of acute alcoholism when he was only forty-seven.