Adam Rawson asked him to come and live at his house.  “You might give Phrony a few extra lessons to fit her for a bo’din’-school,” he said.  “I want her to have the best edvantages.”

Keith soon ingratiated himself further with the old squire.  He broke his young horses for him, drove his wagon, mended his vehicles, and was ready to turn his hand to anything that came up about the place.

As his confidence in the young man grew, the squire let Keith into a secret.

“You mind when you come up here with that young man from the North,—­that engineer fellow,—­what come a-runnin’ of a railroad a-hellbulgin’ through this country, and was a-goin’ to carry off all the coal from the top of the Alleghanies spang down to Torment?” Keith remembered.  “Well, he was right persuasive,” continued the squire, “and I thought if all that money was a-goin’ to be made and them railroads had to come, like he said, jest as certain as water runnin’ down a hill, I might as well git some of it.  I had a little slipe or two up there before, and havin’ a little money from my cattle, lumber, and sich, I went in and bought a few slipes more, jest to kind of fill in like, and Phrony’s growin’ up, and I’m a-thinkin’ it is about time to let the railroads come in; so, if you kin git your young man, let him know I’ve kind o’ changed my mind.”

Miss Euphronia Tripper had grown up into a plump and pretty country girl of fifteen or sixteen, whose rosy cheeks, flaxen hair, and blue eyes, as well as the fact that she was the only heiress of the old squire, who was one of the “best-fixed” men in all that “country,” made her quite the belle of the region.  She had already made a deep impression on both big Jake Dennison and his younger brother Dave.  Dave was secretly in love with her, but Jake was openly so, a condition which he manifested by being as plainly and as hopelessly bound in her presence as a bear cub tangled in a net.  For her benefit he would show feats of strength which might have done credit to a boy-Hercules; but let her turn on him the glow of her countenance, and he was a hopeless mass of perspiring idiocy.

Keith found her a somewhat difficult pupil to deal with.  She was much more intent on making an impression on him than on progressing in her studies.

After the first shyness of her intercourse with the young teacher had worn off, she began for a while rather to make eyes at him, which if Keith ever dreamed of, he never gave the least sign of it.  She, therefore, soon abandoned the useless campaign, and for a time held him in mingled awe and disdain.

The Ridge College was a simple log-building of a single room, with a small porch in front, built of hewn logs and plastered inside.

Gordon Keith, on entering on his new duties, found his position much easier than he had been led to expect.