“Yes,” said Anne. “So do I, Jimmy.”
It would work. The more Jimmy thought about it, the more sure he was that it would work. For a long time he sat silent, holding Anne’s hand tightly clasped in his, planning in his mind the things he was going to do. His ideas in detail were vague, absurd almost, from a practical standpoint; but Jimmy did not realize that. They looked concise enough to him.
He would go to New York to live for a time while he was putting the idea over. All the big business men that he would have to see and convince were there. Jimmy had saved several hundred dollars from his earnings in the Fallon Brothers Mine during the last few years, so that lack of money offered no obstacle. Then, too, he realized with satisfaction, his mother and sister were not dependent on his wages. The large insurance that his father had scrupulously kept up, and the money that he had saved and carefully invested, had left Mrs. Rand, while not rich, at least comfortably independent. That made Jimmy think of his mother’s farm property; and the fact that it might be made to play a part in his big idea came to him at once.
“Why, Anne,” he exclaimed suddenly, “it’s all as clear as daylight to me now. You know mother’s old farm-land over near Coatesville? That’s where I’m going to put the first factory. There’s coal under it—don’t you remember they bored for it two or three years ago? Only it was so deep and the seam was so shallow nobody would work it.”
This piece of land—some two hundred acres—had been left Mrs. Rand by her father. It was poor farm-land, mostly sand, and of little value. Some three years before, a company in search of new coal measures around Coatesville had made borings; but the seam they located was not considered profitable to work, and the project which for a time had promised to make the Rand family rich had been abandoned.
But now, with his new idea, this coal could be used. There was a railroad spur very near the property, Jimmy remembered. It would be an ideal place for a factory. It was the only thing he needed to hook his plan together. Now he could talk convincingly to any big man.
Jimmy, with the optimism of youth, had a world of confidence in himself, and he saw no great obstacles in the way of what he wanted to do. A few weeks or months at the most in New York, and he would be back, with a big factory going up, and all the thousand details of a great enterprise under way. And he would have a part in it all—he would have been its originator. Then, when he was rich and famous, he and Anne would be married. He slipped his arm again about the girl’s shoulders and looked down into her sympathetic, eager little face.
“I love you, Anne,” he said.
“I love you, too, Jimmy,” she answered simply.
He waited a moment. “Yes, but—but this is different, Anne. We’ve always loved each other. But I’m a man now. And you’re a woman. Don’t you see that’s different?”