gistfile1.txt

grammar WordPairs {
    rule word-pair { <key=word> <value=word> }
    token word { \S+ }
    rule TOP { <word-pair>* }
}

my %dict;

class WordPairsActions {
    method word-pair($/) { %dict{~$<key>}.push(~$<value>) }
}

my $match = WordPairs.parse(slurp, :actions(WordPairsActions));
say ?$match;

say "The pairs count of the key word \"her\" in wordpairs.txt is {%dict{"her"}.elems}";

Now, much Better time performance than my original code. Thank You very much! 👍

$ time perl6 cp-mod-colomon.pl wordpairs.txt
True
The pairs count of the key word "her" in wordpairs.txt is 1036

real    0m28.846s
user    0m53.366s
sys 0m2.232s

$ perl6 -e 'say $*VM'
jvm (1.7)

$ nqp-j --version
This is nqp version 2014.08 built on JVM

$ grep "model name" /proc/cpuinfo -m 1
model name  : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz

One note -- I think you might be able to get better performance feeding in the original text file, instead of the paired version? But I admit I'm not at all certain of that, just suspicious. (ie an entirely new script which takes a complete text file and maps each word to the next word, so the end hash is the same.)