True for you, Sam." Tom Rover heaved a short sigh. "My! what a lot
of troubles we have had since we started on this houseboat trip!"

"Yes--but we have had lots of sport too."

The two brothers were standing near the bank of the broad Mississippi
River, just below the town of Shapette, in Louisiana. The party to
which they belonged had reached the town on their journey down the
Father of Waters the day before, and an hour later the houseboat had
been tied up at a bend in the stream and left in charge of a planter
who had appeared and volunteered for the task. The planter had given
his name as Gasper Pold, and had stated that his plantation lay half
a mile inland, on higher ground. He had mentioned several people in
Shapette as being his close friends--among others the principal
storekeeper--and the boys had thought it all right to get him to look
after the houseboat while they paid a visit to a sugar plantation
where one of their party had a distant relative living.

To my old readers the Rover boys, Sam, Tom, and Dick, need no special
introduction. Sam was the youngest, fun-loving Tom next, and cool-headed
and clever Dick the oldest.

When at home the three boys lived with their father, Anderson Rover,
and their uncle Randolph and aunt Martha in a pleasant portion of
New York State called Valley Brook, near the village of Dexter's
Corners. From that home they had gone, as already related in "The
Rover Boys at School," to Putnam Hall, an ideal place of learning,
where they made many friends and also some enemies.

A term at school had been followed by a brief trip on the Atlantic
Ocean, and then a journey to the jungles of Africa, where the lads
went in a hunt for their father, who had become lost. Then they had
gone west, to establish a family claim to a valuable mine, and
afterwards taken two well-deserved outings, one on the Great Lakes
and the other in the mountains.

From the mountains the Rover boys had expected to go back to Putnam
Hall, but a scarlet fever scare caused a temporary closing of that
institution of learning and the lads took a trip to the Pacific coast
and were cast away on the ocean, as told of in "The Rover Boys on
Land and Sea," the seventh volume of this series. But all came back
safely and returned to the Hall, there to do their duty and have
considerable fun, as set forth in "The Rover Boys in Camp."

The boys' uncle, Randolph Rover, had taken an elegant houseboat for
debt. This craft