She had been driving that day in Rock County Nebraska on the lonely stretch of Highway 183 between Taylor and Bancroft when the Chevy pick-up ran out of gas. It was her fault. She hadn’t thought to check the gauge in Burwell after the sale where she had gone to bid on fifty scrappy little red Angus yearling heifers from a breeder in Wyoming. It was May, and the grass looked good, and they’d decided that year to run a few extra cattle. Plus, they wanted to experiment a little and breed a few red Angus first calf heifers with their Hereford bull. While neighboring ranchers were moving into the exotics market or competing by breeding Herefords and Angus for size, the Stiles–in large part due to Mary’s convincing opinions about the cost of inputs versus the gain of a couple hundred pounds, and the potential maternal problems with breeding for size—were thinking in another direction.

John trusted Mary’s ability to judge quality stock, and he often sent her alone with his blessing to bid if she found anything worthwhile. No one, least of all Mary, had any idea how it was she did it, but she could look at a group of calves and know if they were sound or not. Each time before she went to a sale, John reminded her to trust her instincts. She had good instincts about other things too. At that morning’s sale, she had bought as pretty a bunch of heifers as you could hope to find. It was risky to bid on cattle when you didn’t know the grower, but somehow Mary had never made a mistake, and she trusted she hadn’t made one now either. She and John would drive up together the next week in the cattle truck to get them.

There wasn’t a house to be seen for miles in the Skull Valley there north of Rose when the truck sputtered to a stop. Already she knew John would rib her mercilessly about it, wondering what on earth she’d been doing that far north of Burwell when she was supposed to be heading for home after the sale. He would have known, though, without being told what she had been feeling that day, driving for the sheer life of it, through the Sandhills in springtime.