But she found Ralph Dodson not easily disheartened. He did not lay himself open to a direct snub. A member of the board had properly introduced him to her. If he came out of a store as she was going down the street and walked a block beside her she could hardly rebuff him. Before she had been at Piodie a month, the clerk of the school district retired and Dodson was appointed in his place. This annoyed her, because she now had to see a good deal of him; but she could not very well accuse him of having brought about the change merely for that purpose. Vicky found herself studying the man. She looked in him for the same traits that had made her as a child hate his brother. It irritated her that she did not find them. Ralph Dodson was strong, competent, energetic. She would have liked to discover him mean, but instead she uncovered in his view a largeness of vision in civic affairs that surprised her. He believed in good schools even though they cost money. One flaw she found in him. He had kept out of the army during the war and made money while Scot and Hugh were fighting for the Union. But this was true of many men in the far West, which was a long way from the fighting line. One day an accident took place that increased her unwilling admiration of him. Near the schoolhouse was an abandoned mine tunnel, poorly timbered, in which she had forbidden the children to play. Little Johnny Haxtun, playing hide and seek, ventured into it and in the darkness stumbled against a rotten post. At his weight the support crumbled. There was a cave-in, and Johnny lay crushed beneath a mass of rock and timber. Among the first of the rescuers to arrive was Ralph Dodson. He told the young school teacher, who was standing there white and shaken, to get a doctor and have first-aid relief at hand in case Johnny should be alive when he was released. Then, axe in hand, he led the men into the tunnel. It was dangerous work. The fallen timbering had to be cut and dug away. At any moment an avalanche of rock and dirt might pour down from above and kill them all. Dodson did not shirk. He stood up to his job deep in the tunnel, regardless of the little slides trickling down that might at any instant precipitate a hundred tons upon him. The worst of it was that the more dirt and jammed timbers were removed, the greater the peril of a second cave-in. Johnny was still alive. A couple of crossed timbers had protected him from the weight of rock and dirt. Vicky heard his whimpering and came into the tunnel to comfort him. But Dodson would have none of that. He ordered the girl into the open instantly. “This isn’t a woman’s job. Get out,” he told her curtly.