normally be the case, or making arrangements to pay the ransom, Mr. Dorset turns the tables on Bill and Sam, actually demanding thatthey pay him—the princely sum of $250, no less—and return little Johnny so he can take them off their hands. As if we didn't already know it, Johnny's a bit of a handful, so we can understand why his father wants to receive some kind of compensation for being reacquainted with his mischievous, annoying brat of a son.

In the second paragraph of O. Henry's story, the narrator establishes a humorous tone with his description of the town in Alabama where he and Bill Driscoll got the idea for the kidnapping:

"There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course."

"Flannel-cake" was a colloquialism for pancake, so it is a type of ironic humor for a town whose geography was flat to be named "Summit," a term for the highest point of a mountain. The addition of "of course" intensifies the humorous tone; it is absurd for a town so flat to be so comically misnamed.  This opening is an appropriate set-up, tonally, for a story of a criminal plan that will, likewise, go absurdly, comically wrong when the father of the kidnapped boy demands money from the kidnappers to take him off their hands.

O. Henry is not only a king of irony, but he also peppers his writing with exaggeration. "The Ransom of Red Chief" is no exception. Right at the beginning, when Sam and Bill first kidnap Johnny (Red Chief), O. Henry writes,

"That boy put up a fight like a welterweight cinnamon bear,' but, at last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away."

Later, after Sam catches Red Chief trying to scalp Bill, O. Henry exaggerates,

"He (Bill) laid down on his side of the bed, but he never closed an eye again in sleep as long as that boy was with us."

When the men write the ransom note to Mr. Dorset, they exaggerate about where they are. Even though they are hiding very close to Summit, where the boy is from, the letter says they have the boy, "...concealed in a place far from Summit.

Probably the biggest exaggeration of all is found at the very end of the story, when Bill and Sam return Red Chief to his father and ask how long he can hold him. Mr. Dorset says he can give them about 10 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."

If you read closely, you will find some sort of exaggeration on just about every page of "The Ransom of Red Chief"!