Then, when all Greenfield was asleep, and Mrs. Ford, after a long struggle to keep awake, had gone yawning to bed, he sat alone and worked over the problem of his gasoline engine. He ransacked the piles of mechanics' journals for suggestions; where they failed him he tried to think his way ahead without help. While he worked through the night, in a stillness broken only by the crowing of a rooster in some distant farmyard and the sputtering of the lamp, the possibilities of his idea gradually grew in his mind. He was not an imaginative man--the details of the engine absorbed most of his attention--but now and then as the night wore on toward morning he had a dim understanding of the possibilities of horseless transportation. He thought what it might mean to the world if every man had a machine to carry him and his goods over the country at a speed of twenty or even twenty-five miles an hour. It was a fantastic vision, he admitted, but he set his teeth and declared that it was not an impossible one. Sometimes he worked all night. Usually weariness overcame him in the small hours and he was forced to stop and go through another day's work on the farm before he could get back to his real interests again. If the farm was to prosper he must give it his attention every day. The margin of time it allowed for his work on the gasoline engine plans was far too little. By the end of that summer he had made up his mind that he could not spare his time for the farm. He told his wife that he had decided to lease it to his brother and move to Detroit. "My goodness, Henry, what for? We're doing well here; I'm sure you're going ahead faster than any one in the neighborhood," she said in astonishment. "I want to get back to work in the machine shops. I can't do any work on my gasoline engine here. Even if I had the time I haven't the equipment," he explained. "Well, I must say. Here we've worked hard, and got a comfortable home, and a fine farm, that pays more every year, and sixteen head of good stock--and you're going to leave it all for a gasoline engine that isn't even built. I don't see what you're thinking of," said poor Mrs. Ford, confronted thus suddenly with the prospect of giving up all her accustomed ways, her old friends, her big house with its stock of linens and its cellar filled with good things. "You can't begin to make as much in the city as you do here," she argued reasonably. "And suppose the engine doesn't work, after all?" "It'll work, all right. I'm going to keep at it till it does," Ford said. CHAPTER XI BACK TO DETROIT Mrs. Ford's opinion was now shared by the whole Greenfield neighborhood as soon as it learned Ford's intention of leaving his fine, paying farm and moving to Detroit to work in a machine shop.