“But Colonel!” implored Hawkins; “stop and think; don’t be rash; you know it’s the only chance we’ve got to get the money; and besides, the Bible itself says posterity to the fourth generation shall be punished for the sins and crimes committed by ancestors four generations back that hadn’t anything to do with them; and so it’s only fair to turn the rule around and make it work both ways.”

The Colonel was struck with the strong logic of this position.  He strode up and down, and thought it painfully over.  Finally he said: 

“There’s reason in it; yes, there’s reason in it.  And so, although it seems a piteous thing to sweat this poor ancient devil for a burglary he hadn’t the least hand in, still if duty commands I suppose we must give him up to the authorities.”

“I would,” said Hawkins, cheered and relieved, “I’d give him up if he was a thousand ancestors compacted into one.”

“Lord bless me, that’s just what he is,” said Sellers, with something like a groan, “it’s exactly what he is; there’s a contribution in him from every ancestor he ever had.  In him there’s atoms of priests, soldiers, crusaders, poets, and sweet and gracious women—­all kinds and conditions of folk who trod this earth in old, old centuries, and vanished out of it ages ago, and now by act of ours they are summoned from their holy peace to answer for gutting a one-horse bank away out on the borders of Cherokee Strip, and it’s just a howling outrage!”

“Oh, don’t talk like that, Colonel; it takes the heart all out of me, and makes me ashamed of the part I am proposing to—­”

“Wait—­I’ve got it!”

“A saving hope?  Shout it out, I am perishing.”

“It’s perfectly simple; a child would have thought of it.  He is all right, not a flaw in him, as far as I have carried the work.  If I’ve been able to bring him as far as the beginning of this century, what’s to stop me now?  I’ll go on and materialize him down to date.”

“Land, I never thought of that!” said Hawkins all ablaze with joy again.  “It’s the very thing.  What a brain you have got!  And will he shed the superfluous arm?”

“He will.”

“And lose his English accent?”

“It will wholly disappear.  He will speak Cherokee Strip—­and other forms of profanity.”

“Colonel, maybe he’ll confess!”

“Confess?  Merely that bank robbery?”

“Merely?  Yes, but why ’merely’?”

The Colonel said in his most impressive manner:  “Hawkins, he will be wholly under my command.  I will make him confess every crime he ever committed.  There must be a thousand.  Do you get the idea?”

“Well—­not quite.”

“The rewards will come to us.”

“Prodigious conception!  I never saw such ahead for seeing with a lightning glance all the outlying ramifications and possibilities of a central idea.”

“It is nothing; it comes natural to me.  When his time is out in one jail he goes to the next and the next, and we shall have nothing to do but collect the rewards as he goes along.  It is a perfectly steady income as long as we live, Hawkins.  And much better than other kinds of investments, because he is indestructible.”