Snareville II: Circles Read Online Free Page A

larger one. The homes were a mix of logs harvested from the island, by the looks of the stumps, to lumber scavenged from houses in town. Glass windows, neatly trimmed in white, stood out from the faces of the homes. Between the windows were what looked like trapdoors built into the wall. Smoke rose from chimneys of the houses. To the north of the houses was a barn. Small paddocks lined the walls of the barn, with access from the stalls so the horses could be turned out. An arena was built to the west of the barn. A smaller barn stood to the east of the main.
    “The boys have their own place,” Wally explained. “We’ve got so many mares in here in the spring, if they’re in the same barn, it gets pretty noisy.”
    About that time, one of the studs caught wind of our mares. He bellowed his welcome out into the quiet afternoon. Ella’s mare answered.
    “And so it begins,” Wally grinned.
    Cherokee looked around at the place, decided it wasn’t that interesting and dropped his head to snag some grass. We were directed where to take the geldings and where the mares were to be stalled. An hour later we were squared away. The horses rolled in the sand, glad after three days of riding to be rid of the saddles. Wally’s own herd wandered in to see who had come for a visit. Since they were on an island, he didn’t bother to run fences. The only pens were those near the barn. He used other islands for graze as well when the grass needed a rest.
    We were introduced around to the folks on the island. They were a nice bunch. Mix of farmers and small town folks who found it safer to live out here on the islands than to stay in town.
    “Savanna’s pretty tight, but out here you don’t have to worry about a swarm of three thousand zeds come wandering down the road,” Wally said.
    “We do our trading. We deal with pirates now and then who think we’re easy pickin’s out here. We help defend town when called on.” Said a girl Wally introduced her as Ducky, his wife. A little girl toddled around the sandy yard. She had her daddy’s brown eyes. “We’ve taken people out of town when they were overrun too. That ferry’ll haul a lot of people at once. When we can regroup, we run the zeds out.”
    “How many people live up here?” Jinks asked.
    “Couple hundred in town. Twenty here on this island,” Wally said. He passed around bottles of beer I recognized from the bar. We had unloaded the pack saddles. They had given us a list of things that were hard to get hold of up here. We had almost all of it in Princeton and Snareville. It was a good trade. This run would cover the price of all our mares, so we wouldn’t have to bring packs next time we came up.
    We spent the next week helping out around the island. The landing for trade was on the north end and we helped out there with boats and such. There was a small bar, much cleaner than the roadhouse, attached to the trading post. A lot of people came over and shopped there. Cherry was given some proper clothes and pitched in at the store. While she was quiet, I never thought she was crazy. Who knows, maybe Havers said that just so I wouldn’t think he was too much of an ass.
    The mares came into heat and we had them bred. The three warm bloods were put with one stud, the Arab and Shetland with the other. This way, if we were lucky enough to get a stud colt of our own, we could breed the mares back and not inbreed our own herd. It was a noisy affair and as far as I knew, none of these mares had been mothers before. Next month would tell how successful we were. I hoped none of them came back into heat.
    At the end of the week, we sat around the interior of Wally’s home. It was the biggest on the island, centered in a ring of the other houses. It was defensible with solid steel doors and thick sheet steel lining the walls between the logs and drywall. The holes we saw in the walls from outside were shooting ports. If needed, the people on the island could lock themselves in