The Fence by Gary Yeagle

A college freshman and Civil War reenactor in Gettysburg finds his life upended by unexpected romance, conflict, and danger—until a mysterious fence reveals that nothing around him is as it seems.

Max Miller, a nineteen-year-old Civil War reenactor is a college freshman in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Max is looking forward to four years of normal college life, but his time spent at school turns out to be anything but normal. He meets an eighteen-year-old Mennonite girl, which results in the loss of his part-time job.

He also finds himself in danger of being sued and suffers numerous injuries from an attack. Two men in his life, a college roommate and a wealthy Mennonite farmer are making Max's life very stressful but then he discovers the fence and things are not what they seem to be.

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Excerpt from The Fence © Copyright 2025 Gary Yeagle

CHAPTER ONE

The short walk from his college dorm to Mussleman Stadium only took Max ten minutes. As a rule of thumb, he didn’t enjoy most sports. The only sport he had been involved in as a youth had been little league and high school baseball down in South Carolina. His roommate, a muscular lad from the Southern Tier of New York State, was a second-string lineman for the Gettysburg Bullets. He had been invited to the game and Max could hardly refuse. Besides, it was Saturday night, and he didn’t have anything else planned so, it was off to a night of small-town college football.

Shirk Field was centered in the stadium, surrounded by a well-maintained six-lane turf running track flanked on either side by tall metal bleachers. The stands were already filling up quickly with students and local football fans. Sitting on an end seat five rows up, he found himself seated next to three young female students. Two of the three reminded him of the typical young college girls he had seen around campus: far too much makeup, fashionable jeans, stylish hairdos, expensive designer sneakers, and purses.

The third female of the trio whom he was seated next to stood out like a sore thumb with long blond hair, fixed in a grandmother-style bun, a long black dress buttoned up to the neck that ran down to just above her ankles, and a pair of plain, ankle high, black lace-up shoes. She wore no jewelry and carried no purse. Wrapped around her neck was a hand-crocheted off-white scarf. Max was about the farthest thing from being a ladies’ man one could imagine but he couldn’t help thinking about how this girl looked plain; a plain Jane. If his mother told him once she told him a hundred times while growing up that it was unwise and foolish to judge another person by their appearance alone. First impressions could be very misleading.

He had been staring too long when the girl, her hands folded neatly at her thin waist, turned slightly and gave him a gentle smile. His previous opinion of her being plain was quickly altered as he gazed at the angelic face of a China doll complexion: rosy cheeks, deep hazel green eyes, and full lips. This girl was anything but plain. She appeared pure, wholesome, and downright beautiful in its simplest form. A more pronounced, genuine smile formed on her lips when she nodded again in his direction. Smiling, he nodded back but then felt awkward for thinking she was plain.

Turning his attention back to the field, he thought about how difficult it was to not judge people. It seemed like a natural reaction. Wanting to gaze at the girl's face once again, but not desiring to be too obvious, he focused on the players who were busy preparing themselves for the upcoming gridiron contest.

Minutes later, Gettysburg kicked off to their opponent, and three plays later following a long downfield pass, Gettysburg’s football team found themselves trailing early in the game by a score of 6-0. Watching Franklin and Marshall’s placekicker drop the ball perfectly between the uprights of the goalpost, the score was now 7-0.

Max found it difficult to concentrate on the game as he had no interest in football. He looked off into the distance, not even a mile away from where he saw the lights of town—at one time, one hundred and forty-nine years in the past Gettysburg had been a small rural, somewhat religious farming community surrounded by the gently rolling hills of the Pennsylvania countryside. Today, Gettysburg was no longer considered a small farming community, but a thriving small city, actually a borough, complete with everything people needed to survive. Gettysburg, the county seat of Adams County, had its hospital, Walmart, drugstores, car washes, churches, restaurants, and all the other service-related businesses people required.

Gettysburg was one of those towns that wherever you went and whoever you talked to was well known, a town steeped in the history of the Civil War, namely the epic battle between the North and South referred to as the turning point of the war. On July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd back in 1863 over fifty thousand soldiers had lost their lives within a few miles of where he now sat.

Gettysburg was also known for the immortal speech that Lincoln gave; The Gettysburg Address. He remembered how back when he was in junior high, he had to memorize the famous speech for a school play where he had portrayed Abraham Lincoln. Thinking back to that time, which was just eight years in the past, he recalled how proud his mother had been of him as he stood before the crowded auditorium at Charles B. DeBose Middle School in Summerville, South Carolina while reciting Lincoln’s famous words without missing a beat. His father had agreed with his great performance and said the play was out of sync with the way Lincoln looked.