Two small-time criminals, Bill Driscoll and Sam Howard, kidnap a boy named Johnny, the red-haired son of Ebenezer Dorset, an important citizen, and hold him for ransom.

Calling himself "Red Chief", Johnny proceeds to drive his captors to distraction with his unrelenting chatter, malicious pranks, and demands that they play wearying games with him, such as riding 90 miles (140 km) on Bill's back pretending to be an Indian scout.

The father, who knows his son well and realizes how intolerable he will be to his captors and how eager they will soon be to rid themselves of the delinquent child, rejects their demand and offers to take the boy off their hands if they pay him $250 (equivalent to $8,200 in 2023).

[3] Indirect adaptions include the 1929 Japanese silent comedy Straightforward Boy by Yasujirō Ozu,[4] the British film Don't Ever Leave Me (1949) played with a girl instead, with Petula Clark in the role, an episode of Rugrats titled "Ruthless Tommy" where Tommy is mistaken for the child of "Ronald Thump", the episode "The Ransom of Red Chimp" of the 1990s Disney animated series TaleSpin, the 1985 Soviet animated short Imp with a Fluffy Tail [ru], the films Too Many Crooks (1959)[citation needed] and Ruthless People (1986) (which take the story a step further), and "The Ransom of Rusty Rex", a segment of the 2015 anthology film Tales of Halloween.

[5] A 2015 episode of the radio comedy anthology Stanley Baxter's Playhouse, titled "Two Desperate Men" after how the kidnappers sign their note, relocated the story to rural Scotland in the 1930s.