“It was to find I hadn’t any home, no more.  Father had been dead a year.  Frank Erne still lived in the house where Milly had left him.  I stayed with him awhile, an’ I grew old watchin’ him.  His farm had gone to weed, his cattle had strayed or been rustled, his house weathered till it wouldn’t keep out rain nor wind.  An’ Frank set on the porch and whittled sticks, an’ day by day wasted away.  There was times when he ranted about like a crazy man, but mostly he was always sittin’ an’ starin’ with eyes that made a man curse.  I figured Frank had a secret fear that I needed to know.  An’ when I told him I’d trailed Milly for near three years an’ had got trace of her, an’ saw where she’d had her baby, I thought he would drop dead at my feet.  An’ when he’d come round more natural-like he begged me to give up the trail.  But he wouldn’t explain.  So I let him alone, an’ watched him day en’ night.

“An’ I found there was one thing still precious to him, an’ it was a little drawer where he kept his papers.  This was in the room where he slept.  An’ it ’peered he seldom slept.  But after bein’ patient I got the contents of that drawer an’ found two letters from Milly.  One was a long letter written a few months after her disappearance.  She had been bound an’ gagged an’ dragged away from her home by three men, an’ she named them—­Hurd, Metzger, Slack.  They was strangers to her.  She was taken to the little town where I found trace of her two years after.  But she didn’t send the letter from that town.  There she was penned in.  ’Peared that the proselytes, who had, of course, come on the scene, was not runnin’ any risks of losin’ her.  She went on to say that for a time she was out of her head, an’ when she got right again all that kept her alive was the baby.  It was a beautiful baby, she said, an’ all she thought an’ dreamed of was somehow to get baby back to its father, an’ then she’d thankfully lay down and die.  An’ the letter ended abrupt, in the middle of a sentence, en’ it wasn’t signed.

“The second letter was written more than two years after the first.  It was from Salt Lake City.  It simply 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