Fatty's capture and escape is a sequence of seizure, coercive interrogation, and sudden reversal. Eustace Cox and Shorty first drag Fatty Worth from hiding, bind him in a shack, and try to extract information from him by force. The apparent victory is temporary: a later account reveals that Katy, Fatty's cousin, breaks him out of jail through armed intimidation, shoots the jailer when he refuses to cooperate, and rides away with Fatty before the town responds. The episode therefore converts captivity into another stage of violence rather than a secure triumph for the men who captured him.

Capture in the Outhouse

Eustace Cox leads the physical seizure. He walks through the alley to the outhouse where Fatty is concealed, swings his shotgun, and drives its butt into the door with enough force to knock it from its hinges. Fatty is found squatting over the drop hole. Eustace grabs the front of his shirt and jerks him out, ripping the shirt partly away; when Fatty protests with a racist insult, Eustace strikes him on the head with the shotgun stock and knocks him unconscious.

The capture is staged as both humiliation and display of strength. Fatty's bare body is exposed in the last sunlight, and Eustace carries him across the street over one shoulder, his bare backside visible to the world. The narrator presents the feat as nearly Herculean because Fatty is unusually large. Hog accompanies the procession like an escort, producing an absurd tableau: a large Black man carrying a fat white man with his clothes hanging open, followed by a wild hog, while apparently no one intervenes or even seems to notice.

Eustace carries Fatty to the shack across from the brothel, hauls him into a back room, and drops him on the floor before lifting him into a chair. Shorty binds him with four bandannas that Eustace has pulled from his pocket. Hog watches the knot-tying with concentrated attention, as though studying the procedure. Shorty then places a handkerchief in Fatty's mouth. Fatty's pants remain partly lowered, and the scene preserves the indignity of the capture rather than allowing him the conventional appearance of a formidable prisoner.

Interrogation as Controlled Violence

Shorty defines the interrogation as a process in which punishment is certain whether Fatty answers or remains silent. He announces that he will ask simple questions and pistol-whip Fatty between them, warning that Eustace may make Fatty's brains leak from his nose if he hesitates. Fatty objects that receiving a beating for speaking and another for refusing to speak makes no sense. Shorty answers that the first beating is meant to demonstrate that they are serious, turning violence into both punishment and explanation.

The exchange gives the scene its grimly comic logic. Shorty speaks with elaborate calm while describing the destruction of Fatty's face and the possible leakage of his brains. He also treats Fatty's sexual complaint about Jimmie Sue as evidence of his own repulsiveness, suggesting that a cousin's mercy is required because women commonly reject him. The language makes cruelty sound procedural, almost administrative, even as the threatened injuries become increasingly grotesque.

The threat becomes physical when Shorty slams the gun barrel onto Fatty's exposed genitals. Fatty screams, his head dropping forward, and liquid from the drink he has consumed in the saloon spills onto the floor. The blow marks the lowest point of the interrogation and joins bodily pain to degradation. Hog cannot tolerate the spectacle and leaves both the room and the shack. Eustace Cox follows the moment with an insult about Hog's appetite, saying that even a hog would not taste Fatty's leavings, though Hog has eaten excrement before. The animal's departure functions as an involuntary measure of the scene's excess: the violence has become too much even for its nonhuman observer.

From Captive to Evidence

After the assault, Fatty is brought to the sheriff. By then he is wobbling and bleeding from several places. Eustace Cox reduces his story to a dime novel, while the narrator explains the circumstances to Sheriff Winton. Fatty then collapses onto his side. Sheriff Winton orders that he be moved to the floor because the cot should not be covered in blood and because Fatty smells terrible; Eustace adds that some of the smell belongs to Hog.

This transfer changes Fatty's immediate function. In the shack, he is the object of Shorty's questions and Eustace's physical force. In the sheriff's presence, his battered condition becomes part of a larger account that the narrator can report. Yet the episode does not establish a stable legal resolution. Fatty is not securely confined by the time the narrative's next account reaches the jail break; the violence applied to him has extracted no guaranteed control over his future.

Katy's Jail Break

The escape is recounted later by Spot, who explains that the trouble began when Katy came to the jail while he was emptying the slop jar. Harlis opened the cell with his gun and key, and Katy presented herself as Fatty's cousin. When Harlis made a sexually suggestive remark, Katy drew a small pistol from her purse and ordered him to leave Fatty free, threatening to shoot him in the stomach if he refused. She also orders Spot, using a racist command, to stand against the wall near the cell while she controls the room.

Harlis attempts to resist by insisting that he cannot open the cell. Katy shoots him in the stomach. The wound does not immediately kill him: he sits against the bars, moaning and urinating on himself, while Katy keeps her pistol trained on Spot. Under threat of being shot next, Spot picks up the keys and opens the cell. Fatty emerges smiling, an unsettling contrast to Harlis's suffering and to the injuries Fatty himself has recently endured.

Fatty then turns the jail's own equipment into a weapon of humiliation. He orders Spot to fetch the slop jar, dumps its contents over Harlis's head, and forces the wide-mouthed jar down over him. The jar eventually fits over Harlis's head but splits slightly, leaving a mess. Harlis is already bleeding heavily, and Spot cannot determine whether the stomach wound or suffocation kills him. The uncertainty does not soften the consequence: the jailer is left dead while Fatty's release is secured.

Escape and Consequences

Spot recognizes that he will be the next target if he stays. He breaks for the back door, striking it so hard that it comes off its hinges, and escapes over the ridge. A bullet passes close enough to burn his ear. From the ridge he sees townspeople peeking from their houses but not moving toward the jail. Katy has brought horses already saddled and ready, and she and Fatty ride quickly down the street. Fatty carries a rifle taken from the office, turning the escape into an armed departure rather than a flight by an unprepared prisoner.

The event's value shift is decisive. Fatty begins as a man hiding over an outhouse drop hole, is reduced to an unconscious and half-undressed captive, and ends the sequence mounted, armed, and beyond immediate restraint. The capture promises information and control; the escape restores Fatty's freedom while adding Harlis's death, Spot's near-fatal pursuit, and another demonstration of Katy's willingness to use lethal force. The result is not a clean reversal from order to disorder, because the jail itself is already a violent and coercive space. Instead, both sides operate through bodily domination, and the person who controls the weapon, keys, and horses controls the scene.