From the kitchen window she saw him sitting idly on the horse-block in the middle of the forenoon, 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 dream half the time,” the wife said, worried. “You aren’t coming down with a fever, are you?”
“I should say not!” Henry replied hastily, with visions of brewed snakeroot and wormwood. “I feel fine. Where’s the milk pail?”
He took it and his lantern and hurried out to the barn, but even while he sat on the three-legged stool, his practiced hands sending streams of warm milk foaming into the pail, his mind returned to that problem of the steam engine. He was sure a machine could be made to do the work of horses; he was confident that he could make it if he persisted long enough.