“An’ ev’ry night you jest tie up alongside the bank, you say?” he remarked, as he kept at the side of Jerry, with regard to whom he seemed to have taken an especial fancy, for some reason or other. “Why, yes, that’s the easiest way of doing with a houseboat, which, after all, is pretty much the same as one of your shantyboats, used to carry potatoes and truck down to market,” Frank had taken it upon himself to answer. “Now, here’s just where we had our camp fire,” Bluff, who was in advance, remarked. “It got squdged by that downpour of rain, all right, I should say. And here you see, we tied the—Frank, Frank, _she’s gone!_” he suddenly ended with an excited yell, as he saw the well-known spot where the _Pot Luck_ had been moored, vacant, and not the first sign of their floating home. Will clung to Frank in the first shock of his dismay; while Jerry echoed the loud cries of the first discoverer of this new calamity that seemed to have overtaken them. CHAPTER XIV—THE RUNAWAY HOUSEBOAT They all stared as if they could hardly believe their eyes. The moon had set about the time the storm started; but since the sky was already clearing, the stars gave a certain amount of light. And especially on the river it was possible to see for some distance. Frank was almost as dumbfounded as his chums when this alarming fact burst upon them. Without the houseboat, their cruise down the Mississippi must come to an end. “They must have been hiding somewhere near by,” lamented Will, “and saw the whole bunch of us scooting down the road; so that the chance they just wanted came along.” “Say, Frank, he thinks it must have been Ossie Fredericks!” exclaimed Jerry; “but I say it was that Marcus Stackpole. He wanted to get that treasure Uncle Felix hid away on board so neat that even I never could find it. But Marcus, he’s bound to get it, even if he has to take the old boat, and tear her to flinders. Oh! what a bunch of gumps we were to leave her that way, to run to a fire.” The countryman was listening to all they said, and trying to grasp the situation. Frank saw him step over to the tree to which they had fastened the cable of the boat so securely, as they thought. “This whar you tied her up, boys?” asked the young farmer. “To that tree, yes,” Frank replied. “What have you found—a piece of the rope left there?” “Jest what I hev,” came the reply, as the other took out a match, and prepared to strike it. “Sliced it off as neat as you please; didn’t they?” demanded Bluff, angrily. “Wall, not as I kin see,” replied the farmer, bending closer to look, as the match flamed up. “This hyar rope, she’s gone and busted clear off!” “No knife used, then, you mean?” asked Frank, jumping at conclusions. “Nixy a knife,” came the answer, in a positive tone. “Then that settles it,” Frank went on, turning to his comrades. “Our cable turned out a bad one, boys; and in the storm, when the wind struck the side of the cabin, the rope snapped off short!”