In the second paragraph of O. Henry's story, the narrator establishes a humorous tone with his description of the town in Alabama where he and Bill Driscoll got the idea for the kidnapping:
"There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course."
"Flannel-cake" was a colloquialism for pancake, so it is a type of ironic humor for a town whose geography was flat to be named...
In the second paragraph of O. Henry's story, the narrator establishes a humorous tone with his description of the town in Alabama where he and Bill Driscoll got the idea for the kidnapping:
"There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course."
"Flannel-cake" was a colloquialism for pancake, so it is a type of ironic humor for a town whose geography was flat to be named "Summit," a term for the highest point of a mountain. The addition of "of course" intensifies the humorous tone; it is absurd for a town so flat to be so comically misnamed. This opening is an appropriate set-up, tonally, for a story of a criminal plan that will, likewise, go absurdly, comically wrong when the father of the kidnapped boy demands money from the kidnappers to take him off their hands.
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