"You got a choice. Hang as a horse thief or teach our schoolkids."

That was the decision facing Mage Casebolt, a decision that made him wish he had never disembarked the riverboat at New Orleans.

Bound for San Francisco to join his brothers in a gambling emporium, Mage's journey halts abruptly in Valley Springs when he is framed for horse stealing.

The teaching job is unpleasant enough, but then a cholera epidemic quarantines the town, saddling him with an old freed slave, twelve boisterous schoolchildren who make a practice of running teachers out of town, and the local postmistress who detests the idea of a gambler playing the part of schoolmaster.

Then the rustlers hit, and Mage faces the task of reining them in with his little contingent of misfits. He quickly realizes that mixing kids, guns, dynamite, and rattlesnakes can make life mighty exciting, and uncertain.