“I recognized Milly’s handwritin’, an’ I recognized her way of puttin’ things. But that second letter told me of some great change in her. Ponderin’ over it, I felt at last she’d either come to love that feller an’ his religion, or some terrible fear made her lie an’ say so. I couldn’t be sure which. But, of course, I meant to find out. I’ll say here, if I’d known Mormons then as I do now I’d left Milly to her fate. For mebbe she was right about what she’d suffer if I kept on her trail. But I was young an’ wild them days. First I went to the town where she’d first been taken, an’ I went to the place where she’d been kept. I got that skunk who owned the place, an’ took him out in the woods, an’ made him tell all he knowed. That wasn’t much as to length, but it was pure hell’s-fire in substance. This time I left him some incapacitated for any more skunk work short of hell. Then I hit the trail for Utah. “That was fourteen years ago. I saw the incomin’ of most of the Mormons. It was a wild country an’ a wild time. I rode from town to town, village to village, ranch to ranch, camp to camp. I never stayed long in one place. I never had but one idea. I never rested. Four years went by, an’ I knowed every trail in northern Utah. I kept on an’ as time went by, an’ I’d begun to grow old in my search, I had firmer, blinder faith in whatever was guidin’ me. Once I read about a feller who sailed the seven seas an’ traveled the world, an’ he had a story to tell, an’ whenever he seen the man to whom he must tell that story he knowed him on sight. I was like that, only I had a question to ask. An’ always I knew the man of whom I must ask. So I never really lost the trail, though for many years it was the dimmest trail ever followed by any man. “Then come a change in my luck. Along in Central Utah I rounded up Hurd, an’ I whispered somethin’ in his ear, an’ watched his face, an’ then throwed a gun against his bowels. An’ he died with his teeth so tight shut I couldn’t have pried them open with a knife. Slack an’ Metzger that same year both heard me whisper the same question, an’ neither would they speak a word when they lay dyin’. Long before I’d learned no man of this breed or class—or God knows what—would give up any secrets! I had to see in a man’s fear of death the connections with Milly Erne’s fate. An’ as the years passed at long intervals I would find such a man.