I am making the assumption that the slave device you have needs to talk modbus. If this is so, you will need an RS485/RS232 converter (I don't think the ML1200 supports RS485 directly from the 8-pin mini din socket?)
Set the port for modbus MASTER (ensuring the communication protocols are set the same as your slave device - baud rate/parity etc) then use MSG blocks in your code to interrogate the slave device (there are plenty of samples of Micrologix code set up for modbus).
Not sure what the reference to the 1762-OW8 was related to (unless i have totally misinterpreted your setup)...
Hope this helps.
Rob