The episode opens with Milly and her brother wandering around Dodge hungry and in rags looking for their father. Literally, they are in filthy rags, as in their clothes could fall from their bodies at any minute! With Milly being seventeen this could become a completely indecent situation! Dad is a hopeless bum who converts into alcohol any money that he finds, yet says how he raises his kids are his business in a time when it really was that way.
Milly visits a girl she knew before she got married and realizes the girl was poor before, but because of marriage she is financially secure and no longer hungry. Thus Milly decides the only way to change her fate is to get married. She borrows a dress from her friend and visits three bachelors in search of a husband. The first is old and fat and he knows it. He figures she is playing a joke on him with her proposal and runs her off. The second is a confirmed woman hating bachelor and also runs her off. The third one is closer to her age - a moonshiner - and likes the idea of sex with the girl but not the idea of marriage ties. She manages to escape his attempted assault.
Milly is angry at these men. Her age is between that of a woman and a child, so she comes up with a rather pointless childish revenge for the very adult feeling of that of a woman scorned, although it seems she dodged three bullets from my perspective. She and her brother vandalize the property of the men who rejected her. The result yields more than she bargained for, but it also gives her and her brother a way out of their impoverished situation.
At the beginning I figured that one of the three men would turn out to be a diamond in the rough, that he and Milly would agree to a marriage of convenience that would evolve into love. Nope, there are very few traditional happy endings on Gunsmoke.