Town sheriff McDuffie's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Sheriff McDuffie stood on the ridge above the settlement and counted forty-one roofs where last spring there had been twenty-eight. He counted them again. Not one had a wall around it. Raiders had been sighted two valleys over at dawn, and the sun was already past noon. He had built a jail, a hall, a doctor's office, a forge, a farm. He had not built the one thing that would keep any of it standing after tonight. He walked down into the lanes with a coil of rope on his shoulder and a plan half-formed. He needed a perimeter by dark. Not a stone wall, not yet. A line. Something that would slow men on horseback long enough for his people to get inside the hall and for him to answer with a rifle. He started marking stakes at the outer cabins, pacing off distances, driving posts with the back of a hatchet. Dr. Richard found him at the third stake. The doctor came at a fast walk, coat open, stethoscope swinging. He did not slow to greet him. "McDuffie. If they hit us tonight, I have one table and one pair of hands. I cannot treat a family and a wounded fighter at the same time. Pick." "I'm not picking," McDuffie said. He drove the stake. "I'm building a fence line before sundown. Trench, sharpened posts, brush piled thick. Chokes them to one road in." "By yourself?" "By every hand that can lift." Dr. Richard looked at the sun, then at the roofs. "Then move my building inside your line. If you leave it out, I lose patients before they reach me." McDuffie had meant to pull the perimeter tight around the hall and the storehouses. The doctor's office sat further out, near the road. Including it meant a longer line, more posts, less depth. Excluding it meant wounded bleeding out in the open. He redrew the line in his head. "Inside. I'll need your waiting room for anyone we can't move." "Take it." McDuffie called in the farmhands, the apprentices, the smiths. He set them to digging a shallow trench between the outer cabins and the tree line. Others dragged felled saplings and sharpened the ends. The blacksmiths hammered iron spikes into the tops of the corner posts. By dusk, a ragged barrier ran the length of the settlement's north face, bending in to swallow the medical building. One road in. One road out. It was not a wall. It was a fence a determined man could climb in under a minute. But it was a line, and behind it every roof was accounted for, and every family had somewhere to run. McDuffie posted himself at the choke with a rifle across his knees. The raiders had not come yet. When they came, they would come at his line first, and not at the cradles behind it.