"What do you mean?" demanded Mr. Kingley.
"Just what I say. Where's young Bill Kingley?" insisted Joe, growing more suspicious every minute.
"Who wants Bill Kingley?" asked a voice from the doorway, and Mr. Bill himself came in. He looked excited and worried. "I say, dad, have you heard? Queen Teresa has been kidnaped! We've got to find her! There are three reporters out here."
"Reporters! Why should they come to me?" wondered Mr. Kingley, chafing under the fiery gaze of Joe Cary.
"Tessie was carried off in your car," Joe reminded him. "I should think the police, as well as the reporters, would want to talk to you. The Queen of the Sunshine Islands was found in the basement of your store, and now she has been carried off in your car. It sounds——"
"How!" interrupted Mr. Bill, stepping in front of his shrinking father and facing Joe. "How does it sound to you, Cary?" he asked thirstily.
"Queer!" Joe told him flatly. "Darned queer! But if you don't tell all you know now, Mr. Kingley, you'll have to come through some day!" He regarded Mr. Kingley with an odd combination of eager hope and hot defiance. Would Mr. Kingley tell all he knew now?
But Mr. Kingley had stood all he was going to stand from Joe Cary. "You—you—" he stammered furiously and had to stop for breath. "You're discharged! Discharged! Do you hear? I won't let any employee talk to me as if I were a kidnaper and a thief!"
"Yes, you will!" Joe dared to say to his purple face. "Unless you prove you aren't a kidnaper and a thief! And you'd better not discharge me! I suspect too much! When I'm ready to leave, I'll resign. You had better go now and talk to your reporters," he added with contempt. "You'll miss the afternoon papers if you don't. And that would be too bad, when you have some more publicity for the Evergreen."
"What do you mean, Joe?" asked Mr. Bill, who could not make anything of the eager words that Joe was uttering, and that made his father so apoplectic that he could only gasp and gurgle and shake his fist at Joe as he left the room. "What do you mean?" Joe seemed to mean so much more than he said.