So, firstly, here’s my flimsy evidence for the exact date, as O Henry published the story in 1907 without telling us when it took place. There’s a line in the 1998 movie where Andy asks his dad to take him to Buffalo Bill’s show in the “capital city next week.” This being set in Alabama, that means Montgomery. The only other thing O Henry gave us is an Autumn setting. Well, lookit this:

Those circled dates are Christopher Lloyd’s birthday (Oct 22) and mine (Oct 18). That’s a sign. It’s gotta be one of those years. At least the movie setting does. Mrs Dorset’s dress and the women “protesting a saloon” helped me narrow it down to 1895.

Now, Switchblade Sam turns up in Wichita, Kansas by jumping out of a boxcar. Sam Howard, in the movie (which is the only canon we’re using for this) turns up in the fictional Summit, Alabama sitting on the front of a train with his ‘buddy,’ Bill. (They’re disaster bisexuals and I will die on that hill.)

Already, we’ve got a family penchant for trains. Howard is a lot nicer than Switchblade, and actually bonds with the impulsive, aggravating boy he kidnaps. While neatly managing to ensure Bill is the one stuck with him lol…but he likes the kid. Doesn’t try to kill him and even gets pissed off thinking Andy is unappreciated by his father. So I don’t think he’d abandon any of his own on purpose. But! There’s a line when he’s having a minor tiff with Bill that ends in the joke “Your honor, I didn’t know she was married, I swear!”

He claims to have met Bill in an orphanage where they grew up together. So here’s what I think. They are, for all intents and purposes, life partners who run harebrained schemes together without ever managing to get ahead. They mean well, but they aren’t all that educated and people keep taking advantage of them instead of the other way around. From time to time, one of them has an affair with a woman in the towns they pass through, not really thinking much of it. They’re men, men are meant to sleep with women. But ultimately they only care about staying with each other.

At some point in recent history, Sam Howard got a married woman in a lot of trouble. Unfortunately, he’s gone and untraceable before finding out just how much trouble she was actually in. Not just cast out for adultery, but pregnant. He’s happily settled as a model citizen in Summit, knowing nothing about it. She’s left in poverty to raise the girl on her own, leading to an unprotected young woman who gets taken advantage of by a man who promises everything and gives her nothing.

The resulting daughter will go on to sink even further, forced to support herself the only way a “fallen” woman was allowed to. In 1938, at the age of 23, she has a little boy with an unknown father and names him Sam after the man who has become a bitter cautionary tale handed down through generations. She takes care of the kid as best she can because it’s expected and sometimes even thinks he’s almost sweet when he’s not making a nuisance of himself. But he’s just one more mouth to feed, her clients don’t like him being underfoot, and more often than not she sends the kid off out of the way.

He falls into a bad crowd, learning to steal in order to keep himself and his mother fed. Learning to fight to keep what he’s stolen. She dies when he’s around 13 or so, leaving him without even that pitiful excuse for a roof over his head. He tries, but there’s nothing in town for him. No one who wants to extend any help to “that dead whore’s thieving son.” He takes off on a train, fully aware he’s following in a long lost somebody’s footsteps and figuring it was meant to be.

Maybe he tries again, from time to time, to make an honest go of it, but he already looks like…what he is, basically. His face when the sheriff calls him over suggests he’s used to being hassled by cops. At some point, he decided it is what it is and just accepted this was his life.

Because Sam is petty and dangerously spiteful. Doesn’t think a single thing about yoinking an apple out of a toddler’s hand with a knife. In broad daylight. One wrong move and the kid is seriously injured. No hiding that. A kid Gunther’s age can manage to explain enough about the scary man with a knife, and if that kid is bleeding the story gets pretty credible. And then, of course, by the end, not only was he ready to kill Dennis, he was willing to make a second attempt while being in the back of a cop car. In front of the entire neighborhood.

And, yeah, that’s on-brand. Sam is pretty blatant. Just wandering around town and stealing in broad daylight. The purse was smooth, sure. Hanging by the playground fence and seemingly staring at kids while stealing it…not so much. Still, he didn’t even break a sweat when confronted by the sheriff. And the two houses he broke into, he wasn’t even trying to be sneaky. Hell, in the first one, not only was it daytime, he temporarily left his cigarette lying on the dresser. If that’s not a home with a habitual smoker in it, the smell is going to be obvious. He definitely left ash.

The man is leaving evidence all over town, barely any thought of hiding. But, see, he’s also planning to skip out at midnight the same way he showed up. Dangerous, petty, and…strangely clueless. It’s like he thinks that roaming the country in boxcars, going on day long crime sprees before disappearing in the night, is never gonna catch up with him.

Sure, it was a little harder to track someone from town to town like that back in ‘93, and definitely even harder when he probably got started, assuming he’s been at it for a few decades by then. A lot worse crimes than he was visibly committing went unsolved for those same decades prior to the internet.

Let’s touch on that ‘visibly’ part again, though. What we don’t see, but know from his own words that he’s done, is tied people up. Possibly taken hostages. Meaning he’s gotten caught before now and narrowly escaped. If he’s ever been arrested, it wasn’t for long. Lots of guys, he said. In other words, a significant number of people in who knows how many cities could reliably identify him and testify at a trial no matter where he gets caught.

Gotta do a little math here. Assuming Sam was 55, and allowing for the idea he must’ve started sometime in his teens -because there’s no way he had a good childhood- that’s a four decade career. No idea when he started town-hopping, but if he only spends a day or two in each, then even with new towns springing up and expanding, he’s still had enough time to visit nearly every one. Apparently there were between 19 to 20,000 at the time. And forty years is 14,610 days.

That…is a very long time to be rootless and watching your back. Maybe it’s not just that he’s gotten cocky. (Although he definitely has lol) He’s also all out of any fucks to give and it’s kinda interfering with his survival instinct.

No wonder he was so willing to let Dennis tie him up to demonstrate proper 5 year old restraining technique. The kid’s just blundering around. Stupid and naive, like all of them. Clearly a little bit of a troublemaker if he’s been tied up, before, so…I mean, the man’s got a mild head injury and already been set on fire once. He understands why someone would tie this kid up. But, still, Dennis is just a dumb kid. Thinks they’re buddies on a camping trip. Get him neutralized and everything’s gonna be fine.

Plus, even though Sam pushed back against the idea of not knowing what he was doing, he didn’t argue with the idea he’d never tied up a five year old. Wanted to know how it was different. If he’s taken a kid hostage before -and given how he first defaults to playing the nice, harmless grown up to lure Dennis in, and clearly has no problem with potentially harming them, he probably has- it went much better than this.