The boy kissed her abstractedly, his mind still busily groping with the flood of ideas that were surging into it. “I can control it easy, Anne, if I start it right, by the air I give it. Why, it’s just like when we have a fire here in the mine. You remember the fire started in C tunnel last fall—your father was working there. He found it when it was only in that one room. All we did was wall up that room from the main tunnel, and it went right out when it couldn’t get any air, didn’t it?” Anne nodded. “Besides, over in Coatesville, didn’t a whole mine get away from them a few years ago?” Jimmy continued earnestly. “The fire got to the mine-bottom before they could shut it off, and the white-damp began exploding, so they had to get out of the whole mine. All they did then was seal up the shafts at the top to shut off all the air in the whole mine. The fire went out of itself when all the air was used up.” Again the girl nodded; his arguments seemed sound and quite unanswerable. “Well, that’s just the way I’m going to do it. It’ll work, Anne—I know it will,” said Jimmy. “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.