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.

“So as I drifted on the long trail down into southern Utah my name preceded me, an’ I had to meet a people prepared for me, an’ ready with guns.  They made me a gun-man.  An’ that suited me.  In all this time signs of the proselyter an’ the giant with the blue-ice eyes an’ the gold beard seemed to fade dimmer out of the trail.  Only twice in ten years did I find a trace of that mysterious man who had visited the proselyter at my home village.  What he had to do with Milly’s fate was beyond all hope for me to learn, unless my guidin’ spirit led me to him!  As for the other man, I knew, as sure as I breathed en’ the stars shone en’ the wind blew, that I’d meet him some day.

“Eighteen years I’ve been on the trail.  An’ it led me to the last lonely villages of the Utah border.  Eighteen years!...I feel pretty old now.  I was only twenty when I hit that trail.  Well, as I told you, back here a ways a Gentile said Jane Withersteen could tell me about Milly Erne an’ show me her grave!”