I. The land had been theirs since long before any of them could remember. As a child in the fifties, Lawrence Smith grew up playing in its spring-fed creek and riding in a mule-drawn wagon driven by his father, who grew peanuts, sweet potatoes, and watermelons in its loamy soil. Once he’d grown into a man, Lawrence used its pasture for raising cattle and hogs, some of which he had butchered for his freezer, alongside the venison from deer he regularly shot as they bounded across its 36 acres. Lawrence tended the land for decades, as his father had before him. But then the twin cities of Bryan and College Station, ten miles to the northwest, saw rapid growth. About twenty years ago land values began…
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