Or else I've got wheels.
It looks to me as if things are running round and round in circles
instead of getting anywhere."
"What do you mean?" asked the man of progress.
"Why, look what he has done to 'Smoky'," I replied.
"You will always be a fool," said my friend, the sociologist,
getting up and walking away.
VIII
THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF
It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down
South, in Alabama--Bill Driscoll and myself--when this kidnapping
idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, "during a
moment of temporary mental apparition"; but we didn't find that out
till later.
There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called
Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and
self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a
Maypole.
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. We talked it over on the
front steps of the hotel. 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.
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