Strangers

laughter.
        "Well, gee, I probably would," the child replied. "You member when Grandma and Grandpa came over to dinner at our place, and there was a big storm, really big, and some lightning struck the tree in our yard, and there was this boom! and I peed my pants?" Looking around the table at her new extended family, she said, "I was soooo embarrassed."
        Everyone laughed again, and Jorja said, "That was more than two years ago. You're a bigger girl now."
        To Dom, Ernie said, "You haven't told us yet why Thunder Hill is the place, rather than Shenkfield. What'd you find in the newspaper?"
        In the Sentinel for Friday, July 13, exactly one week after the closure of I-80 and three days after its reopening, there was a report of two county ranchers - Norvil Brust and Jake Dirkson - who were having trouble with the Federal Bureau of Land Management. A disagreement between ranchers and the BLM was not unusual. The government owned half of Nevada, not merely deserts but a lot of the best grazing land, some of which it leased to cattlemen for their herds. Ranchers were always complaining that the BLM kept too much good land out of use, that the government ought to sell off part of its holdings to private interests, and that leases were too expensive. But Brust and Dirkson had a new complaint. For years they leased BLM land surrounding a three-hundred-acre Army installation, the Thunder Hill Depository. Brust held eight hundred acres to the west and south, and Dirkson was using over seven hundred acres on the east side of Thunder Hill. Suddenly, on Saturday morning, July 7, though four years remained on Brust's and Dirkson's leases, the BLM took five hundred acres from Brust, three hundred from Dirkson; and at the request of the Army, those eight hundred acres were incorporated into the boundaries of the Thunder Hill Depository.
        "Which just happens to be the very morning after the toxic spill and the closure of I-80," Faye observed.
        "Brust and Dirkson showed up Saturday morning to inspect their herds, per their usual routine," Dom said, "and both discovered that their livestock had been driven off most of the leased pasture. A temporary barbed-wire fence was being thrown into place along the new perimeter of the Thunder Hill Depository."
        Having finished dinner, Ginger pushed her plate aside and said, "The BLM simply told Brust and Dirkson it was unilaterally abrogating their leases, without compensation. But they didn't receive an official written notice till the following Wednesday, which is extremely unusual. Ordinarily, a notice of termination comes sixty days in advance."
        "Was that kind of treatment legal?" Brendan Cronin asked.
        "Right there's the problem of doing business with the government," Ernie told the priest. "You're dealing with the very people who decide what's legal and what isn't. It's like playing poker with God."
        Faye said, "The BLM's despised around these parts. No bunch of bureaucrats is more high-handed."
        "That's what we gathered from reading the Sentinel," Dom said. "Now, Ginger and I might've figured the Thunder Hill business was just coincidental, that the BLM just happened to go after that land the same time as the crisis on I-80. But the way the government dealt with Brust and Dirkson after the land was seized was so extraordinary it made us suspicious. When the ranchers hired attorneys, when stories about the cancellation of their leases began appearing in the Sentinel, the BLM did a sudden about-face and offered compensation, after all."
        "That's not a bit like the BLM!" Ernie said. "They'll always make you drag them into court, hoping litigation will wear you down."
        "How much were they willing to pay Brust and Dirkson?" Faye asked.
        "The figure wasn't revealed," Ginger said. "But it was evidently darned good, because Brust and Dirkson accepted it overnight."
        "So the BLM bought their silence," Jorja said.
        "I think it was the Army working secretly through the BLM," Dom said. "They realized the longer the story was in the news, the more chance there was of someone wondering about a link between the crisis on I-80 that Friday night and the unorthodox seizure of land the very next morning, even if the two events were ten or twelve miles apart."
        "Surprises me somebody didn't make the connection," Jorja said. "If you and Ginger could spot it this long after the