Carefully and noting every particular, Captain Fowler, who was in fact a policeman of the high seas, had heard from Captain Austin, and from his star divers, Jay Thacker and Dick Monaghan, the whole story of Carl Weddigen. The Brighton boys started with their first encounter with Carl in the plant of the Bridgeford Company. They told of the first experience on the _Dominion_ when Carl had been discovered in the act of secreting diamonds in his diving suit, and how he was compelled to disgorge through the craftiness of Larry Seymour. The affair off Cape May was related, and this was the most damaging evidence, for it proved the fellow an enemy of the United States Government. "It surely will go hard with this chap after we turn him over to the Department of Justice at Washington," Captain Fowler had ventured in an opinion on the future status of the prisoner. For Carl was now a prisoner aboard the _Marblehead_, closely confined under constant guard in such a way that he could not possibly escape. At first Weddigen had been sullen and close-mouthed. Repeated efforts to get him to tell his story had failed; how he had fitted out his pirate craft, where he had got the speedy little vessel, and how he had shipped his crew; and, finally, how he had cleaned out the _Dominion_. But now that he had come to realize that he was literally "up against it" and that he was to be delivered over to the United States Government to face a court trial and possible death for espionage and high crimes against the government, to say nothing of his plots against the lives of the men of the _Jules Verne_, the German prisoner had decided to tell his own story in the hope that it might in some way mitigate the whole case against him. And this was the story he had told: Following his escape from the Navy Yard at Boston after the Cape May affair he had shipped aboard a coastwise trader bound that same day for Rio Janeiro. Going down the coast he had ingratiated himself in the favor of members of the crew by rescuing one of their number who had gone overboard in a terrific midsummer storm. The crew, most of them Latin-Americans, had acclaimed Weddigen their hero, and he at once assumed leadership among them. One night he had confided to some of them the story of the _Dominion_ and the gold bullion that still remained to be taken from her hold. In awe and in envy they had listened to the story. Their own greed aroused, they had proved willing converts to a plan to fit out an expedition and go after the treasure.