In the end the men with money dropped the matter. Ford was obstinate, but he was a small man with no capital, merely a crank who had hit by accident on a good idea; he would come around all right in time, they concluded.
Ford continued to work at the Edison plant and spend his evenings trying to improve his machine. He had taken Mrs. Ford to Greenfield, where she would stay with her mother until the baby was born. After that one hysterical outburst on the night the automobile was finished, she had returned to her cheerful acceptance of his interest in the car. Indeed, she herself had become enthusiastic about its possibilities.
“You stay right here and keep your job with the Edison people,” she said. “I’ll be perfectly all right with mother, and maybe by the time I come back you’ll have a company organized and a whole factory going, who knows? Only, mind you don’t work too late at night, and promise you’ll eat your meals regular.”
Ford promised, but when he returned to the dark little house at night and faced the task of building a fire and cooking supper for himself it seemed to him a bigger job than building the automobile had been. He heated some coffee on the gasoline stove, burned some bread into a semblance of toast, and scrambled a few eggs. Then he spread a newspaper on the kitchen table, set the frying-pan on it, and managed to make a meal.
Naturally about midnight he grew hungry. He came into the kitchen, looked at the cold, greasy frying-pan, still setting on the kitchen table, remembered that he was out of bread, and thought of an all-night lunch wagon that stood near substation A, where sometimes he bought a cup of coffee when he was working there.
The automobile stood waiting in the shed; he told himself that he wanted to test the steering gear again, anyway. He went out, started the engine, climbed in and chug-chugged away through the silent, deserted streets to the lunch wagon.
Coffee Jim, loafing among his pans and mounds of hamburg steak, was astonished to see the queer little machine, jerking and coughing its way toward him. He remembered Ford, and while he sliced the onions and cut the bread for Ford’s midnight luncheon they talked about the automobile. Afterward Coffee Jim examined it in detail and marveled. When Ford took him for a little ride in it he became enthusiastic.
Soon it was part of Ford’s routine to drive the little car to the lunch wagon at midnight, have a cup of coffee and a hot sandwich and a chat with Coffee Jim. They became friends.
It was one of those accidental relationships which have great consequences. A hundred thousand Ford automobiles to-day owe their existence largely to that chance friendship between Ford and Coffee Jim.