Standing awkwardly just inside the entrance, uneasy in surroundings of luxury and manifestly apprehensive of club servants in livery, stood a young man with a knee quite torn from his trousers, with a hat that would never again be fit for service, with a face that appeared to have come into contact with emery-paper, and with a general accumulation of dirt on his clothes.
“Why, Givens,” said Potter, “what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“No, sir,” said Givens, “not hurt to speak of, but shook up. I—I knew you would be here, Mr. Waite, so I busted right in. I thought you ought to know right off.”
“Yes,” said Potter, impatiently.
“I’m one of the office messengers,” Givens said. “We use motor-cycles—”
“I know who you are. What has happened?”
“I was to stop at twelve o’clock to get a package of drawin’s or somethin’ from Hammond and Green, the engineers. I got them all right, and started for the plant. Went up Woodward to the Boulevard and across. You know where the Boulevard goes under the railroad? Well, right there a machine came up behind me and bumped me. I went down pretty hard. Sort of knocked out for a minute. When I scrambled up I looked all over for that package, but I couldn’t find it any place. It couldn’t have fell anywhere out of sight, for I was right under the railroad. There wasn’t any sewer openin’s or anythin’.... Somebody must ’a’ swiped it. I hunted good, and then I come down here as fast as I could. The motor-cycle wasn’t hurt any.”
“What was in the package? What drawings?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
Potter called an attendant. “Show this man the wash-room and help him brush up,” he said. Then he stepped quickly into a telephone-booth and called the plant.