They needed $2000 more "to pull off a fraudulent real estate deal in western Illinois".
They perceived the town as full of "inhabitants of as harm less and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered round a maypole."
They thought "Family ties are strong in semirural communities, says we; 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. We knew that Summit couldn't get after us with anything stronger than constables and, maybe, some lackadaisical bloodhounds and a diatribe or two in the local paper."
The (mistakenly) figured that the wealthy father of the boy they planned to kidnap "would "melt down for a ransom of two thousand dollars in a flash."
