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.
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