THE RIDGE COLLEGE
The school over which Gordon had undertaken to preside was not a very
advanced seminary of learning, and possibly the young teacher did not
impart to his pupils a great deal of erudition.
His predecessors in the schoolmaster's chair had been, like their
patrons, the product of a system hardly less conservative than that of
the Locrians. Any one who proposed an innovation would have done so with
a rope about his neck, and woe to him if it proved unsuccessful.
When Gordon reported first to the squire, the old man was manifestly
pleased.
"Why, you've growed considerable. I didn't have no idea you'd be so big
a man." He measured him with satisfaction. "You must be nigh as big
as your pa."
"I'm broader across the shoulders, but not so tall," said the young man.
"He is a pretty tall man," said the squire, slowly, with the light of
reflection in his eye. "You're a-goin' to try the Ridge College, are
you?" He had a quizzical twinkle in his eye as it rested on the younger
man's face.
"I'm going to try it." And Gordon's face lit up. "I don't know much, but
I'll do the best I can."
His modesty pleased the other.
"You know more than Jake Dennison, I reckon, except about devilment. I
was afred you mightn't be quite up to the place here; you was rather
young when I seen you last." He measured him as he might have done a
young bullock.
"Oh, I fancy I shall be," interrupted the young man, flushing at the
suggestion.
"You've got to learn them Dennison boys, and them Dennison boys is
pretty hard to learn anything. You will need all the grit you've got."
"Oh, I'll teach them," asserted Gordon, confidently. The old man's eye
rested on him.
"'Tain't _teachin'_ I'm a-talkin' about. It's _learnin'_ I'm tellin' you
they need. You've got to learn 'em a good deal, or they'll learn you.
Them Dennison boys is pretty slow at learnin'."
The young man intimated that he thought he was equal to it.
"Well, we'll see," grunted the old fellow, with something very like a
twinkle in his deep eyes. "Not as they'll do you any harm without you
undertake to interfere with them," he drawled. "But you're pretty young
to manage 'em jest so; you ain't quite big enough either, and you're too
big to git in through the cat-hole. And I allow that you don't stand no
particular show after the first week or so of gittin' into the house any
other way."
"I'll get in, though, and I won't go in through the cat-hole either.
I'll promise you that, if you'll sustain me."
"Oh, I'll sustain you," drawled the squire. "I'll sustain you in
anything you do, except to pizon 'em with _slow_ pizon, and I ain't
altogether sure that wouldn' be jest manslaughter."
"All right." Keith's eyes snapped, and presently, as the outer man's
gaze rested on him, his snapped also.
So the compact was struck, and the trustee went on to give further
information.
"Your hours will be as usual," said he: "from seven to two and fo' to
six in summer, and half-past seven to two and three to five in winter,
and you'll find all the books necessary in the book-chist. We had to
have 'em locked up to keep 'em away from the rats and the
dirt-daubers. Some of 'em's right smartly de-faced, but I reckon you'll
git on with 'em all right."
"Well, those are pretty long hours," said Gordon. "Seems to me they had
better be shortened. I shall--"
"Them's the usual hours," interrupted the old man, positively. "I've
been trustee now for goin' on twenty-six year, an' th'ain't never been
any change in 'em. An' I ain't see as they've ever been too
long--leastways, I never see as the scholars ever learned too much in
'em. They ain't no longer than a man has to work in the field, and the
work's easier."
Gordon looked at the old man keenly. It was his first battle, and it had
come on at once, as his father had warned him. The struggle was bitter,
if brief, but he conquered--conquered himself. The old countryman's face
had hardened.
"If you want to give satisfaction you'd better try to learn them
scholars an' not the trustees," he said dryly. "The Dennison boys is
hard, but we're harder."
Gordon looked at him quickly. His eyes were resting on him, and had a
little twinkle in them.
"We're a little like the old fellow 'at told the young preacher 'at he'd
better stick to abusin' the sins of Esau and Jacob and David and Peter,
an' let the sins o' that congregation alone."
"I'll try and give you satisfaction," said Keith.
The squire appeared pleased. His face relaxed and his tone changed.
"_You_ won't have no trouble," he said good-humoredly. "Not if you're
like your father. I told 'em you was his son, an' I'd be responsible
for you."
Gordon Keith looked at him with softened eyes. A mention of his father
always went to his heart.
"I'll try and give you satisfaction," he said earnestly. "Will you do me
a favor?"
"Yes."
"Will you come over to the examination of the school when it opens, and
then let me try the experiment of running it my way for, say, two
months, and then come to another examination? Then if I do not satisfy
you I'll do anything you say; I'll go back to the old way."
"Done," said the trustee, cordially. And so, Gordon Keith won another
victory, and started the school under favorable auspices.
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.
Whether it was the novelty of the young teacher's quiet manner, clear
eyes, broad shoulders, and assured bearing, or the idea of the
examination with which he undertook to begin the session, he had a week
of surprising quiet. The school filled day after day, and even the noted
Dennison boys, from Jacob Dennison, the strapping six-foot senior, down
to Dave, who was the youngest and smartest of the three, appeared duly
every morning, and treated the young teacher with reasonable civility,
if with somewhat insolent familiarity.
The day of the examination Squire Rawson attended, solemn and pompous
with a superfluity of white shirt-front. Brief as was the examination,
it revealed to Keith an astonishing state of ignorance of the simplest
things. It was incredible to him that, with so many hours of so-called
study, so little progress had been made. He stated this in plain
language, and outlined his plan for shorter hours and closer
application. A voice from the boys' side muttered that the owner did not
see anything the matter with the old hours. They were good enough for
them. Keith turned quickly:
"What is that?"
There was no answer.
"What is that, Dennison?" he demanded. "I thought I heard you speak."
"Wall, if you did, I warn't speakin' to you," said Jacob Dennison,
surlily.
"Well, when you speak in school, address yourself to me," said Keith. He
caught Euphronia Tripper's eyes on him.
"I mought an' I moughtn't," said Jacob, insolently.
"I propose to see that you do."
Jacob's reply was something between a grunt and a sneer, and the school
rustled with a sound very much like applause.
Next morning, on his arrival at school, Keith found the door fastened on
the inside. A titter from within revealed the fact that it was no
accident, and the guffaw of derision that greeted his sharp command that
the door should be opened immediately showed that the Dennison boys were
up to their old tricks.
"Open the door, Jake Dennison, instantly!" he called.
The reply was sung through the keyhole:
"'Ole Molly hyah, what you doin' dyah? Settin' in de cordner, smokin' a
ciggyah.'"
It was little Dave's voice, and was followed by a puff of tobacco smoke
through the keyhole and a burst of laughter led by Phrony Tripper.
An axe was lying at the woodpile near by, and in two minutes the door
was lying in splinters on the school-house floor, and Keith, with a
white face and a dangerous tremble in his voice, was calling the amazed
school to order. He heard the lessons through, and at noon, the hour he
had named the day before, dismissed all the younger scholars. The
Dennisons and one or two larger boys he ordered to remain. As the
scholars filed out, there was a colloquy between Jacob Dennison and his
younger brother Dave. Dave had the brains of the family, and he was
whispering to Jake. Keith moved his chair and seated himself near the
door. There was a brief muttered conversation among the Dennisons, and
then Jake Dennison rose, put on his hat slowly, and, addressing the
other boys, announced that he didn't know what they were going to do,
but he was "a-gwine home and git ready to go and see the dance up
at Gates's."
He swaggered toward the door, the others following in his wake.
Keith rose from his seat.
"Go back to your places." He spoke so quietly that his voice could
scarcely be heard.
"Go nowhere! You go to h----l!" sneered the big leader, contemptuously.
"'Tain't no use for you to try to stop me--I kin git away with two
like you."
Perhaps, he could have done so, but Keith was too quick for him. He
seized the split-bottomed chair from which he had risen, and whirling it
high above his head, brought it crashing down on his assailant, laying
him flat on the floor. Then, without a second's hesitation, he sprang
toward the others.
"Into your seats instantly!" he shouted, as he raised once more the
damaged, but still formidable, weapon. By an instinct the mutineers fell
into the nearest seats, and Keith turned back to his first opponent,
who was just rising from the floor with a dazed look on his face. A few
drops of blood were trickling down his forehead.
[Illustration: "If you don't go back to your seat, I'll dash your brains
out," said Keith.]
"If you don't go to your seat instantly, I'll dash your brains out,"
said Keith, looking him full in the eye. He still grasped the chair, and
as he tightened his grip on it, the crestfallen bully sank down on the
bench and broke into a whimper about a grown man hitting a boy with
a chair.
Suddenly Keith, in the moment of victory, found himself attacked in the
rear. One of the smaller boys, who had gone out with the rest, hearing
the fight, had rushed back, and, just as Keith drove Jake Dennison to
his seat, sprang on him like a little wild-cat. Turning, Keith seized
and held him.
"What are you doing, Dave Dennison, confound you?" he demanded angrily.
"I'm one of 'em," blubbered the boy, trying to reach him with both fist
and foot. "I don't let nobody hit my brother."
Keith found that he had more trouble in quelling Dave, the smallest
member of the Dennison tribe, than in conquering the bigger brothers.
"Sit down and behave yourself," he said, shoving him into a seat and
holding him there. "I'm not going to hit him again if he
behaves himself."
Keith, having quieted Dave, looked to see that Jake was not much hurt.
He took out his handkerchief.
"Take that and wipe your face with it," he said quietly, and taking from
his desk his inkstand and some writing-paper, he seated himself on a
bench near the door and began to write letters. It grew late, but the
young teacher did not move. He wrote letter after letter. It began to
grow dark; he simply lit the little lamp on his desk, and taking up a
book, settled down to read; and when at last he rose and announced that
the culprits might go home, the wheezy strains of the three instruments
that composed the band at Gates's had long since died out, and Gordon
Keith was undisputed master of Ridge College.
His letter to the trustees was delivered that morning, saying that if
they would sustain his action he would do his best to make the school
the best in that section; but if not, his resignation was in
their hands.
"I guess he is the sort of medicine those youngsters need," said Dr.
Balsam. "We'd better let it work."
"I reckon he can ride 'em," said Squire Rawson.
It was voted to sustain him.
The fact that a smooth-faced boy, not as heavy as Jake Dennison by
twenty pounds, had "faced down" and quelled the Dennisons all three
together, and kept Jake Dennison from going where he wanted to go,
struck the humor of the trustees, and they stood by their teacher almost
unanimously, and even voted to pay for a new door, which he had offered
to pay for himself, as he said he might have to chop it down again. Not
that there was not some hostility to him among those to whom his methods
were too novel; but when he began to teach his pupils boxing, and showed
that with his fists he was more than a match for Jake Dennison, the
chief opposition to him died out; and before the year ended, Jake
Dennison, putting into practice the art he had learned from his teacher,
had thrashed Mr. William Bluffy, the cock of another walk high up across
the Ridge, for ridiculing the "newfangled foolishness" of Ridge College,
and speaking of its teacher as a "dom-fool furriner." Little Dave
Dennison, of all those opposed to him, alone held out. He appeared to be
proof against Keith's utmost efforts to be friends.
One day, however, Dave Dennison did not come to school. Keith learned
that he had fallen from a tree and broken his leg--"gettin' hawks' eggs
for Phrony," Keith's informant reported. Phrony was quite scornful about
it, but a little perky as well.
"If a boy was such a fool as to go up a tree when he had been told it
wouldn't hold him, she could not help it. She did not want the eggs,
anyhow," she said disdainfully. This was all the reward that little Dave
got for his devotion and courage.
That afternoon Keith went over the Ridge to see Dave.
The Dennison home was a small farm-house back of the Ridge, in what was
known as a "cove," an opening in the angle between the mountains, where
was a piece of level or partly level ground on the banks of one of the
little mountain creeks. When Keith arrived he found Mrs. Dennison, a
small, angular woman with sharp eyes, a thin nose, and thin lips, very
stiff and suspicious. She had never forgiven Keith for his victory over
her boys, and she looked now as if she would gladly have set the dogs on
him instead of calling them off as she did when he strode up the path
and the yelping pack dashed out at him.
She "didn' know how Dave was," she said glumly. "The Doctor said he was
better. She couldn' see no change. Yes, he could go in, she s'posed, if
he wanted to," she said ungraciously.
Keith entered. The boy was lying on a big bed, his head resting against
the frame of the little opening which went for a window, through which
he was peeping wistfully out at the outside world from which he was to
be shut off for so many weary weeks. He returned Keith's greeting in the
half-surly way in which he had always received his advances since the
day of the row; but when Keith sat down on the bed and began to talk to
him cheerily of his daring in climbing where no one else had ventured to
go, he thawed out, and presently, when Keith drifted on to other stories
of daring, he began to be interested, and after a time grew
almost friendly.
He was afraid they might have to cut his leg off. His mother, who always
took a gloomy view of things, had scared him by telling him she thought
it might have to be done; but Keith was able to reassure him. The Doctor
had told him that, while the fracture was very bad, the leg would
be saved.
"If he had not been as hard as a lightwood knot, that fall would have
mashed him up," said the Doctor. This compliment Keith repeated, and it
evidently pleased Dave. The pale face relaxed into a smile. Keith told
him stories of other boys who had had similar accidents and had turned
them to good account--of Arkwright and Sir William Jones and Commodore
Maury, all of whom had laid the foundation for their future fame when
they were in bed with broken legs.
When Keith came away he left the boy comforted and cheered, and even the
dismal woman at the door gave him a more civil parting than her
greeting had been.
Many an afternoon during the boy's convalescence Keith went over the
Ridge to see him, taking him story-books, and reading to him until he
was strong enough to read himself. And when, weeks later, the lame boy
was able to return to school, Keith had no firmer friend in all the
Ridge region than Dave Dennison, and Dave had made a mental progress
which, perhaps, he would not have made in as many months at school, for
he had received an impulse to know and to be something more than he was.
He would show Phrony who he was.
It was fine to Gordon to feel that he was earning his own living. He was
already making his way in the world, and often from this first rung of
the ladder the young teacher looked far up the shining steep to where
Fame and Glory beckoned with their radiant hands. He would be known. He
would build bridges that should eclipse Stevenson's. He would be like
Warren Hastings, and buy back the home of his fathers and be a great
gentleman.
The first pay that he received made him a capitalist. He had no idea
before of the joy of wealth. He paid it to old Rawson.
"There is the first return for your investment," he said.
"I don' know about its bein' the first return," said the squire, slowly;
"but an investment ain't done till it's all returned." His keen eyes
were on Keith's face.
"I know it," said Keith, laughing.
But for Dr. Balsam, Keith sometimes thought that he must have died that
first winter, and, in fact, the young man did owe a great deal to the
tall, slab-sided man, whose clothes hung on him so loosely that he
appeared in the distance hardly more than a rack to support them. As he
came nearer he was a simple old countryman with a deeply graved face and
unkempt air. On nearer view still, you found the deep gray eyes both
shrewd and kindly; the mouth under its gray moustache had fine lines,
and at times a lurking smile, which yet had in it something grave.
To Dr. Balsam, Keith owed a great deal more than he himself knew at the
time. For it is only by looking back that Youth can gauge the steps by
which it has climbed.