It took time to get his ideas translated into concrete, exact figures. He worked over them for nearly a year, holding the enthusiasm of his friends at fever heat all that time. Finally he made drawings for the machines he planned and cut dies for making the different parts of the watch. His plan was complete--a gigantic machine, taking in bars of steel at one end, and turning out completed watches at the other--hundreds of thousands of cheap watches, all alike--the Ford watch! "I tell you there's a fortune in it--a fortune!" the young fellows in the scheme exclaimed to each other. "All we need now is the capital," Ford decided at last. He was turning his mind to the problem of getting it, when he received a letter from his sister Margaret. His father had been injured in an accident; his older brother was ill. Couldn't he come home for a while? They needed him. CHAPTER VI BACK TO THE FARM The letter from home must have come like a dash of cold water on Henry's enthusiastic plans. He had been thinking in the future, planning, rearranging, adjusting the years just ahead. It has always been his instinct to do just that. "You can't run anything on precedents if you want to make a success," he says to-day. "We should be guiding our future by the present, instead of being guided in the present by the past." Suddenly the past had come into his calculations. Henry spent a dark day or two over that letter--the universal struggle between the claims of the older generation and the desires of the younger one. There was never any real question as to the outcome. The machine-idea has been the controlling factor in his life, but it has never been stronger than his human sympathies. It is in adjusting them to each other, in making human sympathies a working business policy, that he has made his real success. Of course at that time he did not see such a possibility. It was a clear-cut struggle between two opposing forces; on one side the splendid future just ahead, on the other his father's need of him. He went home. He intended at the time to stay only until his father was well again--perhaps for a month or so, surely not longer than one summer. The plans for the watch factory were not abandoned, they were only laid aside temporarily. It would be possible to run up to Detroit for a day or two now and then, and keep on working on plans for getting together the necessary capital.