y said that Milly had heard her brother
was on her trail. She asked Frank to tell her brother to give up the
search because if he didn't she would suffer in a way too horrible
to tell. She didn't beg. She just stated a fact an' made the simple
request. An' she ended that letter by sayin' she would soon leave Salt
Lake City with the man she had come to love, en' would never be heard of
again.

"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 hea