"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. CHAPTER XVII ANOTHER EIGHT YEARS If Ford had been unduly elated over his success in making an automobile the years that followed that night ride in the rain would have been one succession of heart-breaking disappointments. Men with money enough to build a factory were not seeking business ventures in the nineties. Money was scarce, and growing more so. The few financiers who might have taken up Ford's invention, floated a big issue of common stock, and sold the cars at a profit of two or three hundred per cent, saw no advantage in furnishing the Capital to start a small plant on Ford's plan.