"Give them up!" Mr. Bill echoed the words incredulously.
"You bet! You won't dare live there. The Sons of Sunshine won't let you, and they're right. You don't belong there. Show your sense of truth and right and give them up. Let the natives elect their own ruler. It's the only fair way," begged Joe.
"I suppose you'd like me to go back to selling aluminum in the Evergreen!" Tessie proved that she could be as scornful as she could be sweet and shy. But her scorn did not make any impression on Joe.
"I would!" he declared. "I'd love to see you back there in your little black dress earning your own way. And I'd love to have you to walk home with again. And I'd love to go in to a dinner of Granny's boiled beef and raisin pie again. I'd like to go back to where we were when you heard you were a queen! Can't you see, Tess," he pleaded, "that there isn't anything in this queen business any more? Come on and give it up!"
"You're a socialist!" stammered Mr. Bill, so amazed at such plain speaking that he could do nothing but stammer. "You're a rank anarchist!"
Joe tore his eyes from indignant Tessie to stammering Mr. Bill. "If you think that a hatred of queens—white girl queens—for cannibal islands is socialism then I am a socialist," he said boldly. "What do you know about Tessie?" he demanded abruptly. "You never saw her until this musical-comedy-queen business began."
This was so true that Mr. Bill and Tessie both blushed.
"Well, I see her now," Mr. Bill managed to say. "And I'll help her be a Queen. The idea of asking any one to give up a kingdom! I never heard of such an absurd thing in my life!" It was so absurd that he laughed.
"If she doesn't give it up I'll bet it will be taken from her," prophesied Joe. "The Sons of Sunshine are after her. And they are after the Tear of God, too. You saw that gink on the porch the night Tess heard she was a queen. I'll bet he was a Son of Sunshine! And if you ever find anything about that man last night you'll find he was a Sunshine Son too, or I'm a goat! The third time he may get to you, and then you'll remember what I said," he told Tessie gloomily.