He tried to analyze what it was that disturbed him and decided that if a man sees his daughter growing up from babyhood, perhaps helps to tend her, plays with her, teaches her to ride horseback and to swim; if he watches her sprouting up to young womanhood, sees her put up her hair and wear her first long skirts, then he can think of her as his daughter and not be troubled with her pretty ways and her fresh young body. But if it should happen that a father did not see his daughter even once in her life before she became a young woman, then he might be disturbed by her prettiness, seeing in her, her mother of years gone by. It was not like Stud to be worrying about anything except possibly the crops and the stock. He took the world as he found it and found it good. He lived moment by moment and day by day and rested on Sunday. But here was a new and troubling element in his life; a worry, and a dumb, sweet misery which he carried about with him, so that sometimes Gus would have to ask him twice if he had ordered more bran, or if he intended to send for that new belt for the gas engine in the milk house, before Stud was aware Gus was speaking. He thought of it as he went down into the woods with Shep to bring home the cows, and he thought of it while he was topping the tobacco, breaking off the budding white flowers to keep the plants from spindling up and going to seed. He carried his troubles with him into the barns and the haymow, to the table and to bed. Was it likely that she was eighteen and not his daughter? Or was she, perhaps, twenty-one, and the child he had got on Tess Bedermier that moonlight night they had bathed in the lake and afterwards gone back among the willows? He did not know where Tess had gone that autumn. She had quarreled with him and moved away from Brailsford Junction. He wondered if she had ever married, and if she were living now. He thought he would never be satisfied until he found her and asked about Early Ann. But to find her would be a job of clever sleuthing for which Stud felt too big and clumsy. He called on his friend Timothy Halleck in whom he placed utmost faith. Halleck went to Madison to look for a marriage certificate. He came back puzzled and no wiser. He wrote to the only Bedermier he knew, a second cousin of Tess's living in Chicago, but found that this distant relative had not heard of Tess in more than twenty years. Then he went to Old Mrs. Crandall who seemed inclined to confide a secret, but changed her mind and shut her mouth like a clam. At last, having had a real inspiration, he visited Mrs. Marsden, Early Ann's erstwhile landlady, and asked about the girl's mail. "Don't you dare insinuate I look in other people's envelopes," squeaked Mrs. Marsden. "But I did notice the three letters she got were postmarked from Horicon, Wisconsin." This was the only clew which Halleck could offer his friend, but it was sufficient.