Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 108, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 May 1919 — The Future Power [ARTICLE]

The Future Power

By JOE H. RANSON

I (Copyright.) Jimmie Orm of the firm of Strass & Orm, brokers, was dining with his friend. Dr. Edouard Enz. Between the eyes lingered, a pucker that meant that his brain was still digging coldly, mechanically at the problem that had stared at him out of the tangled mass of facts that had been the portion of this day. Rumors, contradictions, flurries; quick, spasmodic leaps and counters of the fluctuating market; uncertainties, panicky sellings of nervous clients, all had contributed to bring Strass to the point almost of collapse, and had set the junior partner, Orm, griinfaced, to clawing his hair. "There’s going to be the deuce to pay,” Orm now spoke coolly, his eyes wandering restlessly over the lighted case, “if the conditions that have prevailed today continue. Strass Is about all In. I never saw him so upset. It’s a bad business for a man with nerves.” He looked across at Enz, who w r as watching him under cover of Cigarette smoke. ‘*l know very little about finance,” began Enz, but Orm interrupted. “Finance,” he snorted. “That’s a pretty name. It’s chance, Ed, the gambler’s god. I wish I were out of it all. But I can’t leave old Strass to be buried in the ruins alone. He has always been very decent to me. But what can I do —what can anyone do — that’s where I butt into the stone wall every time.” As they ate, Orin delivered himself of the things that vexed and puzzled him. Enz led him on, asking now and then a question so pertinent that the broker looked up quickly in wonder. Throughout the . meal the conversation was nearly one-sided. , The conditions were boldly outlined, graphically depicted by Orm. And always he came back to the elemental point of man's Ignorance, his moving always in the narrow lighted space of the hour, beating helplessly against the upreared something which marks the unknown. “If,” .he cried out in a kind of mild frenzy, clinching his fists, “if we could only know, see.” Enz interrupted at last. He had finished his coffee and was lighting a cigarette. His face was slightly flushed as he leaned closer to the center ofi the table and spoke in the lowest of tones. “Foresight,” he said. “That is what you mean. That expresses all that you have said. Imprisoned in the confines of weak, enslaving flesh, man is a puppet, moving In a spot-light, shut In on all sides by elemental darkness. “Ages have raised him from the skin-clad, herb-eating animal that dwelt in caves and was prey to stronger beasts. He has broadened the circle of the lighted space in which he lives, but he is still the helpless mote, ringed round with mystery.” Orm sat with his cup raised halfway to his lips. “Jimmie,” went on Enz, in the same voice, “do you want to know', would you like to be able to see? Or would you be afraid?” “When did you do it, Ed?” he whispered. Without replying, he suddenly slipped his hand into the inner pocket of his coat and took forth a small w’al-. let. - From this he extracted a folded paper, with doubled ends, such as physicians affect for sleeping powders. This he quickly unfolded, and, leaning forward, spilled the contents deftly into the coffee cup which Orm had set before him. “Jimmie,” he smiled, “you may now finish your coffee.” > When, at the usual hour the following morning, Orm aw’oke, it was to the realization of a powerthat was, in its' strangeness, almost uncanny. Coming out of a state of temporary insensibility, lie was terribly, stingingly alive/ His first realization of the unusual came to him as hrs picked up the morning paper. The market pages were hardly more than a rehash of the night He glanced at the date line and was surprised to find that the paper was actually of the present. 'the things that it recited seemed to him ancient. Dirhly his memory groped back to them, took account of all the facts that intervened. Could it be possible that these things that were so clear to him were as yet unknown to the world?” He began to chronicle his information. Hunterton would begin his fight today. From his apartments he took a taxi. He could not wait, though the distance was slight. He even urged the chauffeur to higher speed. He nimself threw open the door and pitched the driver a dollar. , Reason told him that the elevators would carry him faster than his legs. Impulse urged him to bound up the stairs. He stamped about the corridor until a car was ready to ...go up. He was the first one inside. On the sixth floor he threw open a door upon which no sign was painted. The door was unornamented in any way, conspicuous for its lack of gold leaf. A man sat at a desk inside. Orm advanced. “Andrew,” began Orm, running his finger* through his rank mane, “how

much 4money you command this momlngT* . The other looked puzzled. Orm’s face was quite serious. The other was used to the impetuosity of his visitor, and the puzzled look vanished. He named a Sum. Orm pulled up a chair. He leaned forward and talked rapidly, certainly. There was confidence in the v«ry position of his long body. The other man listened with interest. Incredulity came first. Then Orm’s voice, Orm’s personality, the infection that dwelt in his enthusiasm, in his very self-belief, won. The other man grew excited. He rose and stamped about the office. "How do you know?” he asked, halting before the other. “I know,” said Orm. “I simply know I tell you It will happen. It is all as plain to me as though I had read a report of it in this morning’s Sphere. Forty-eight hours from now the Sphere will print the story, almost exactly as I have outlined it” “It seems insane,” mused the other, speaking as much to himself as to Orm. “And yet I can’t get it out of me that you’re right. You’ve got the dope some way*. I don’t know how you’ve got it, and it don’t seem hardly possible to me. yet I- can’t help believing it. That’s the queer part.” When Orm left the office he bore with hint a check and a note. And now began that vigil, that long fight, that nerve-racking, heart-break-ing, grim strife which is not equaled on any battlefield of mere guns and sabers. Orm spent the time in his own sm'all room, watching the coil of tape that told the market’s history. “Always he had the telephone at his elbow. Always he persisted, against all indications, all seeming certainties jhat his course was folly. Strass had succumbed long since to the strain and had been sent home a raving thing.. But Orm sat in his tiny office, commanding a campaign that to others seemed that of a madman, and to himself so simple, so certain, that it was as mere child’s play, a mechanical following out of set forms. It had .begun with the Hunterton crowd throwing Inter-County In blocks upon a questioning, uncertain, palpitating market. Naturally the price fell like a thermometer thrust into an ice-box. It was not until this fall had occurred and the stock was droppingout of sight, at the mad moment when it was being avoided as a pestilential thing, that Orm’s men began quietly, industriously ’ buying. Throughout the day they bought. Orm, in his office, commanded by telephone. The outer office was besieged by wild-eyed beings who thought the young broker suddenly gone mad. Once he threw open his door and stood befdre them, his hair wildly disarrayed, his great figure towering majestically, his face suffused, the dark frown of an angered Odin clouding his brow, and cursed them for a pack of fools. A man sat at a desk in a room on the sixth floor of an office building, a room upon the door of which no. sign appeared, and read a newspaper. He read hungrily, not because the story he was reading was news, but because it was so strikingly akin to a story that Jimmie Orm told the day before, the stbry that Orm had declared was as plain to him as though he had read it in the morning’s paper. The thing had come to pass. The confidence that, in a saner moment had struck him as the trust of an idiot in the maunderings of ft madman, was now justified. It had all happened. The man laid down the paper and looked out of the window. His money, the money that in his hypnotized state he had confided to the hands of mad Jimmie Orm, had made two millionaires. It was a fortnight later when Dr. Edouard Enz received a night letter from Chicago. • It read: “The girl from Milwaukee and I were married tonight. Our love for you. Thank hehven this blanked foresight is wearing off. Never again.” Enz smiled as he slipped the square back into Its envelope. He stood for a moment before the open bed of coals, holding the telegram in his hand. “It will be all right,” he said to himself, turning to the table with its unopened mail. “The effect will wear off entirely in about three weeks. “I fancy itis deuced uncomfortable, though, while it lasts.”