Page:Henry Ford's Own Story.djvu/91

 don't mind much. When I get the gasoline engine finished," he said apologetically, and hurried out to work on it. In a few minutes he was absorbed with the cylinder.

He had found that day a piece of pipe, thrown into the scrap heap at the Edison plant, and it had struck him at once that it would do for his cylinder, and that using it would save him the time and work of making one. He brought it home, cut it to the right length and set it in the first Ford engine.

Meantime, in the house Mrs. Ford cleared away the supper dishes, took out her sewing and settled down with a sigh. The neighbors were going by to the Smiths' party. She could hear them laughing and calling to each other on the sidewalk outside. In the shed her husband was filing something; the rasp of the file on the metal sounded plainly.

After all, she thought, she might as well give up the idea of parties. She couldn't give one herself; she knew Henry would refuse to leave his hateful engine even for one evening. She was very homesick for Greenfield.

The months went by. Ford worked all day at the Edison plant, half the night in his own shop. The men he met in his work had taken to looking at him half in amusement, half in good-humored contempt. He was a "crank," they said. Some of the younger ones would laugh and tap their foreheads when he had gone past them.