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character."
    He explained that he had become acquainted with Will Gordon when they both had attended a private boarding school here in the East. The bonds of friendship then forged had only strengthened with the passage of time.
    Payton Fletcher further stated that Will Gordon was a planter, farming one of the fertile valleys in the tribal lands near northern Georgia. A single-room log house had been constructed on the property to serve as a school for his children and those of his sister. In addition to a salary of four hundred dollars a year, meals and private sleeping quarters within the Gordon home would be provided to the tutor.
    Eliza's imagination immediately took one of its usual melodramatic turns as she envisioned a room of brown-skinned children listening with rapt attention, a host of primitive minds waiting to be enlightened by her teaching. When Payton Fletcher offered the post, Eliza accepted on the spot, certain this was her call of destiny.
    Now, she looked about the grounds through her bedroom window. "A prosperous farm," Payton Fletcher had said. The simple phrase hardly described the obvious wealth that surrounded her. She longed to sit down and compose a letter to her mother, describing it all while the details were still fresh in her mind. But common sense told her that was an impractical use of her time when she had other matters to attend to.
    Letting the curtain fall, Eliza turned from the window and recoiled with a gasp of alarm as she realized that someone stood not four feet from her. Belatedly, she saw it was a boy of no more than eleven. He stared back at her, a sly gleam of mischief shining in his coal black eyes. Eliza pressed a hand to her chest to calm her rapidly beating heart.
    "You startled me," she admitted, then suspected at once that had been his intent. "You must be Kipp," she guessed.
    "And you are the new teacher from the North."
    "I am." With her composure regained, she clasped her hands primly together. "You may call me Miss Hall."  
    Kipp Gordon merely smiled.
    Trouble. With a teacher's sixth sense, Eliza recognized that here was a pupil destined to bedevil her at every turn. She vowed there and then to be more than a match for him.
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    The thickly leaved branches of the towering chestnut tree blocked the rays of the setting sun and cast a premature darkness on the small log schoolhouse. Eliza placed the copy of Webster s Blue-Backed Speller atopthe stack of textbooks and primers on her desk, finished at last with her preparations for the next day's lessons.
    All in all, Eliza felt she had accomplished a great deal in only three short days. The school hours were firmly established. The first class began at eight o'clock in the morning with the arrival of the four Murphy children, the Gordons' cousins: Charlie, age thirteen; Tom, twelve; Mary, ten; and Joe, nine. Lessons continued until the noon meal, then resumed at four in the afternoon, after the heat of the day had passed. The school day concluded with piano lessons for the three girls, Temple, her younger sister, Xandra, and Mary.
    Eliza rose from her desk and circled the room, closing the four windows as she went. At the end of that first day, she had forgotten to shut them. The next morning, she had found a large ratlike creature nosing around her desk. Quite unintentionally, she had screamed, not frightened as much as startled. Kipp Gordon had charged into the schoolhouse just as the poor opossum scrambled across the puncheon floor to the open window. The sound of Kipp's ridiculing laughter still rang in her ears, a match to the scorn that had gleamed in his dark eyes. Trouble—he was definitely that.
    With the contest of wills over for the day, Eliza cast a last look around the schoolroom, then walked out the door, closing it securely behind her. The three-story brick mansion crowned the knoll, its grandeur making it the focal point of the farm. Detached from it were two kitchens and a