“Well,” rejoined Billy, adjusting his spectacles, which had narrowly escaped being jarred off his nose in the bump, “isn’t there room enough in the place without your getting so near that door that you almost upset my slender form?”
“Never mind that,” replied Frank Reade; “what I want to know is, how do I stand in there?”
He motioned with his head toward the managing editor’s room from which the boys were by this time several paces removed.
“I don’t understand you exactly,” was Billy’s reply. He noticed that Reade’s face bore an angry flush and he seemed excited.
“What I mean is this: Am I going to continue to do aviation for the Planet?”
“Say, Fred, old man, I’m awfully sorry——”
“Oh, cut that out. You don’t mean it, and you know you don’t. You wanted to grab off the job for yourself, and I can see by your face that you have.”
“If you mean that I am to do aviation for the Planet in future, you are right,” replied Billy. “I am; but it was only on Mr. Stowe’s orders. You’re wrong, Fred, and you know you are, when you accuse me of trying to take your job away from you.”
“Oh, rot,” exclaimed the other angrily. “If that had been the case you’d have kept away. You don’t have to work. You made plenty of money out of your share of the Golden Galleon treasure. You have just deliberately tried to oust me from my job.”
“You talk as if you’d been fired,” said Billy. “You know that you are one of the most valued reporters on the Planet.”