Ray Cummings

“ Don’t you see?”
“There ain’t any factories over coal-mines,” said Anne.
“No, but there could be just as easy as not. It don’t make so much difference where a factory is, so long as it’s got a railroad. That’s the idea—I’m going to build a factory where the coal is instead of taking the coal to where the factory is.”
“How you going to burn the coal in the ground?” Anne wanted to know.
Jimmy thought a moment.
“Why, just—just burn it,” he answered finally. “You see, Anne,” he hastened to add, “the heat will come up in pipes to the factory boilers at the top—just like the heat comes up.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ He had decided on the Wentworth Glass Company quite by accident—the name was engraved on the glassware of the big Broadway restaurant at which he had dined the evening before, and subsequent inquiries had convinced him it was just the sort of organization he wanted—and so he had planned to interview Robert G. Wentworth, its president, that morning. Yet now it seemed impossible for him to see Mr. Wentworth—the telephone girl seemed to think he was crazy to expect such a thing. ”