Capítulo 1
A Good Thing
It looked like a good thing. Parecía un buen negocio. But wait till I tell you. Bill Driscoll y yo were down south, in Alabama, sudando una tarde lenta when the kidnapping idea struck us. It was, como dijo Bill después, un momento de pura locura — solo que no nos dimos cuenta till much later.
There was un pequeño pueblo down there, flat as a pancake and called Summit, naturalmente. La gente del campo was as harmless and contented as any crowd that ever danced at a village fair.
Entre los dos we had about six hundred dólares, and we needed two thousand more to pull off un negocio turbio de tierras over in Western Illinois. We talked it over on the hotel steps, en la noche. En los pueblos del campo, la gente quiere mucho a sus niños — so a kidnapping ought to work better there than near a big city, donde los periódicos mandan reporteros undercover para armar un escándalo. The worst Summit could send after us was a couple of deputies, a lazy perro or two, and an angry artículo in the local periódico. Así que parecía buena idea.
For our victim we picked the only child of a leading ciudadano named Ebenezer Dorset. El padre era respetable y tacaño — un viejo que adoraba las hipotecas, the kind who prays loudest on Sunday and takes your casa for an unpaid debt on Monday. El chico tenía diez años, with freckles that jumped right off his cara, and pelo del color of a fire engine — a red you could spot from two miles off. Bill y yo estábamos seguros: Ebenezer would pay un rescate de dos mil dólares, down to the last centavo. But wait till I tell you.
About two miles from Summit rose una pequeña montaña, covered with thick cedros. On its far side was una cueva, dark and deep in the rock, and there we stored our supplies. Una tarde al anochecer we drove past old Dorset’s casa in a rented horse-and-buggy. El chico estaba en la calle, throwing rocks at a kitten on the fence across the way.
“Hey, kid!” grita Bill. “¿Quieres una bolsa de dulces y un buen paseo?”
The boy answers by catching Bill square in the ojo with a chunk of brick.
“Eso le costará al viejo quinientos dólares más,” dice Bill, subiendo por la rueda.
That boy fought like a furious little bear, but at last we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away. Lo llevamos a la cueva, and I tied el caballo among los cedros. After dark I drove the buggy back to el pequeño pueblo, a tres millas, where we’d rented it, and walked back to la montaña bajo una luna delgada, in the cold noche.