Trusting to the smother of smoke, Tom moved the boat up closer, and closer still, without drawing a shot. In the burning woods a tree crashed down heavily. Snakes came wriggling out from all directions, and hurried into the water. Once fairly going, the dry trees burned furiously, and already they could see the orange glow through the smoke at the very spot where the house boat must be lying.
“They’ll slip away upstream. We’d never hear nor see them in all this smoke and noise!” Lockwood exclaimed.
A blazing tree fell crashing through the titi thickets, half its length in the bayou. Fire was streaming out in plain sight now.
“I dunno!” muttered Tom. “No—git ready, boys! There she comes!”
Something shouldered heavily out through the smoke cloud. It was the house boat, catching the current and swinging slowly about. She was on fire at both ends, and the cabin roof was ablaze. She came down like a huge, dying bulk, turning helplessly end for end, and there was no man in sight aboard her.
A couple of burned rope ends trailed alongside her. There was no sign of any motor boat. She sagged across the bayou, grounded on a mud bank, swung her stern around, and lay there, crackling and blazing.
Tom Power exploded in a loud curse, and ran the boat up to her. He jumped aboard, revolver in hand, but boarding was hardly needed. The decks were clear, and nothing could have lived in that smoke-filled cabin.
CHAPTER XX
DEEP WATER
With a furious face Power drove the motor boat up through the choke of the smoke clouds, leaving the deserted house boat ablaze on its mud bank. Blackened and half suffocated, they came to the upper entrance of the bayou, into the channel that joined the two rivers, and looked this way and that.
Nothing was in sight either way. Tom suddenly silenced the engine. They were well away from the roar and crackle of the fire. A dead hush fell, and through it they heard a faint, distant beating, faint and elusive as the beat of a dying heart.