![]() ![]() He is resilient, and he patiently persists in their plan, even while Bill panics. Sam seems to be the leader of his and Bill’s duo, as he leaves Bill with undesirable tasks, such as wrangling Johnny. ![]() Henry portrays him as hapless and sympathetic, a benign and delusional man with pathetic criminal aspirations. For their oversights, Sam and Bill wind up paying Johnny’s father Ebenezer to take troublesome Johnny back, rather than making money from their scheme. But in the ‘the ransom of the red chief’ the little boy is so fascinated and adventurous and that he would rather be kidnapped then be at home. When he and Bill conspire to kidnap Johnny, the son of a wealthy man, and hold him for ransom, they do not anticipate the child’s difficulty, the canniness of his father, nor the logistical hurdles of holding a child hostage and demanding and collecting ransom. He is always looking for a "good thing" and a scheme to make a little easy money, but his ideas are terrible-he has no realistic understanding of what criminals do or what plans might succeed-and therefore his plots tend to blow up in his face. Sam, the story’s narrator, is a con-man and a hustler who works with his partner-in-crime Bill to hatch harebrained criminal plots. ![]()
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