The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Cruise of the O Moo, by Roy J. Snell

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Cruise of the O Moo

Author: Roy J. Snell

Release Date: February 1, 2013 [eBook #42040]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRUISE OF THE O MOO***

E-text prepared by Stephen Hutcheson, Rod Crawford, Dave Morgan,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)
from page images generously made available by the
HathiTrust Digital Library
(http://www.hathitrust.org/digital_library)

Adventure Stories for Girls

The Cruise
Of the O Moo

By
ROY J. SNELL

The Reilly & Lee Co.
Chicago

Printed in the United States of America

Copyright, 1922
by
The Reilly & Lee Co.
All Rights Reserved

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I A Mysterious Tapping 7

II The Blue Face in the Night 24

III Lucile’s Quick Action Gas 36

IV Trapped in the Old Museum 51

V A Catastrophe Averted 65

VI The Blue God 78

VII The Mystery Deepens 90

VIII A Strange Game of Hide-and-Go-Seek 103

IX Someone Drops in from Nowhere 117

X The Real Cruise Begins 131

XI A Mysterious Adventure 148

XII The O Moo Rides the Storm 161

XIII Land at Last 177

XIV “A Phantom Wireless” 191

XV The Island’s Secret 202

XVI An Unexpected Welcome 215

XVII Hot Water and a Ghost 226

THE CRUISE OF THE O MOO

CHAPTER I
A MYSTERIOUS TAPPING

Lucile Tucker stirred in her berth, opened her eyes drowsily, then half-framed a thought into a whispered: “What was that?”

The next instant she sat bolt upright. She had heard it again, this time not in a dream. It was a faint rat-tat-tat, with a hollow sound to it as if beaten on the head of a barrel.

She strained her ears to catch the slightest sound but now caught only the constant lash-lash of the flag-rope as it beat the mast of the yacht, the O Moo, a sure sign of a rising storm.

She strained her eyes to peer into the darkness to the right of her; she wanted to see her two companions who should be sleeping there to make sure they were still with her. She could not see; the shutters were tightly closed and there was no moon. The place was dark; black as soot.

She stilled her breathing to listen again, but caught only the lash-lash of that flag-rope, accompanied now and then by the drumlike boom of canvas. The storm was rising. Soon it would be lashing the waves into white foam to send them crashing high above the breakwaters. She shivered. A storm aboard ship had always frightened her.

Yet now as she thought of the term, “aboard ship,” she shrugged her slim shoulders. Her lips parted in a smile as she murmured:

“The cruise of the O Moo.”

Suddenly her thoughts were broken in upon by the repetition of that mysterious sound of a rat-tat-tat.

“Like a yellow-hammer drumming on a hollow tree,” was her unspoken comment, “only birds don’t work at night. It’s like—like someone driving—yes, driving tacks. Only who could it be? And anyway, why would they drive tacks into our yacht at midnight.”

The thought was so absurd that she dismissed it at once. Dismissing the whole problem for the moment, she began thinking through the events which had led up to that moment.

She, with Marian Norton, her cousin—as you will remember if you chance to have read the account of their previous adventure as recorded in the book called “The Blue Envelope”—had spent the previous year on the shores of Behring Straits in Alaska and Siberia. There they had been carried through a rather amazing series of thrilling adventures which had not been without their financial advantages, especially to Marian.

Lucile’s