How have Sam and Bill changed?

Sam and Bill started off on their first kidnapping venture full of confidence. Sam tells the reader:

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.

They decide to ask two thousand dollars ransom for the return of the boy who calls himself Red Chief. But they drop their demand to fifteen hundred dollars even before they send the ransom note. This is because they are already starting to feel frightened of the ten-year-old wildcat.

Their biggest problem seems to be that they cannot exercise any moral authority as adults because they are kidnappers. The boy, who imagines that he is a real Indian chief, has superior moral authority just because an Indian chief necessarily is better than a kidnapper. Red Chief can't be frightened, and they don't dare to use physical punishment because, for one thing, they don't know how far they might have to go. They might end up killing the boy, and then they would be subject capital punishment for a miserable fifteen-hundred dollars. The boy is enough of a problem while he is a friendly and willing captive. He could be a much worse problem if they made him an enemy. They can't tie him up at night, but if they don't tie him up he might try to scalp them in their sleep.

When they finally get a reply from Ebenezer Dorset--whose first name calls to mind Ebenezer Scrooge of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and suggests he will be a tough man to bargain with--he makes them a counter-offer which shows he is fully aware of their situation. He will take Johnny off their hands if they pay him two hundred and fifty dollars. At first the counter-offer seems preposterous, but it isn't long before Sam and Bill realize they are getting a bargain. This is a comical version of what in Hollywood is called a "busted caper story." A planned crime turns into a disaster because of some overlooked detail. In "The Ransom of Red Chief" the hostage enjoys being kidnapped and the father doesn't really want him back. A good example of a busted-caper movie involving kidnapping is Fargo (1996), in which the stakes are higher and the outcome more serious.

Sam and Bill are changed men by the time they deliver Red Chief to his father. They may not be ready to give up their lives of crime, but they are certainly ready to give up any further thoughts of kidnapping. They are two frightened ex-kidnappers when they depart on the run, with Ebenezer Dorset trying to hold his struggling son for the full ten minutes he promised when he accepted their ransom money. Sam tells the reader in the final sentence of the story: 

And, as dark as it was, and as fat as Bill was, and as good a runner as I am, he was a good mile and a half out of summit before I could catch up with him.