The Ransom of Red Chief

2 uses

1 use

"No," says Bill, "nothing chronic except malaria and accidents.†

1 use

So, to relieve Bill, I acceded, and we collaborated a letter that ran this way: Ebenezer Dorset, Esq.: We have your boy concealed in a place far from Summit.†

1 use

I had a scheme for collecting that ransom without danger of being caught by counterplots that ought to commend itself to professional kidnappers.†

1 use

I went up on the peak of the little mountain and ran my eye over the contiguous vicinity.†

1 use

There was a sylvan attitude of somnolent sleepiness pervading that section of the external outward surface of Alabama that lay exposed to my view.†

1 use

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 town-lot scheme in Western Illinois with.†

1 use

They weren't yells, or howls, or shouts, or whoops, or yawps, such as you'd expect from a manly set of vocal organs—they were simply indecent, terrifying, humiliating screams, such as women emit when they see ghosts or caterpillars.†

1 use

"Great pirates of Penzance!" says I; "of all the impudent—"†

1 use

Bill is puffing and blowing, but there is a look of ineffable peace and growing content on his rose-pink features.†

1 use

It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.†

1 use

There was martyrs in old times," goes on Bill, "that suffered death rather than give up the particular graft they enjoyed.†

1 use

The father was respectable and tight, a mortgage fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and forecloser.†

1 use

There was a sylvan attitude of somnolent sleepiness pervading that section of the external outward surface of Alabama that lay exposed to my view.†

1 use

His father peeled him away gradually, like a porous plaster.†

1 use

I'm a grown person with masculine proclivities and habits of self-defense, but there is a time when all systems of egotism and predominance fail.

1 use

I'm a grown person with masculine proclivities and habits of self-defense, but there is a time when all systems of egotism and predominance fail.†

1 use

None of 'em ever was subjugated to such supernatural tortures as I have been.

1 use

Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi-rural communities; 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.†

1 use

If you attempt any treachery or fail to comply with our demand as stated, you will never see your boy again.†