Page:Henry Ford's Own Story.djvu/72

, twisting a straw in his fingers and frowning intently at the side of the barn.

Sometimes after supper, instead of settling quietly down with his papers, he walked up and down, up and down, the sitting-room, with his hands behind his back and that same frown on his forehead. At last she could endure it no longer. She begged him to tell her the worst.

He replied, surprised, that it was a steam engine—he couldn't figure out the ratio of power to weight satisfactorily. The blame thing bothered him.

"Oh, is that all?" Mrs. Ford said indignantly. "Well, I wouldn't bother about it if I were you. What does an old steam engine matter, anyhow? Come and sit down and forget about it."

It was the one thing Ford could not do. His mind, once started on the project of building an engine to use on the farm, remained obstinately at work on the details. He spent weeks considering them one by one, thinking out adaptations, new devices, in an effort to overcome the difficulty.

Still he could not see how to construct a cheap engine which would pull across his soft fields, carry the necessary weight of water, and still develop enough free power to be useful.

He was still struggling with the problem three months after his trip to Detroit.

"I declare to goodness, I don't know what's got into you, Henry. You act like a man in a