On the day that the Brazilian merchantman had touched at Vera Cruz for fresh supplies the little band under Weddigen deserted their ship and took refuge in the Mexican city. From there they had worked their way into the Tampico oil field region and one night stole the handsome new twin-screw auxiliary _Monterey_, the property of a wealthy American oil magnate. Joined by other confederates whom they had recruited among Mexican refugees and bandits, the little party of adventurers had worked their way out of the Tampico River into the Gulf of Mexico, and thence up the Atlantic coast to the little cove where the _Dominion_ had run aground, and where Weddigen had seen enough while employed by the Bridgeford Salvage Company to satisfy him that the desperate effort in quest of the hidden treasure would be well worth the effort, provided he was successful. From a point near the scene of operations the crafty skipper of the _Monterey_ had sent several of his crew ashore in a powerful launch to bargain in a New England seafaring town for a diver's modern outfit. Uninterrupted in their quiet retreat, the German and his Latin-American crew had worked steadily in the reclamation of the gold bullion in the hulk of the _Dominion_. Weddigen had found among his crew one who had had experience as a diver in the West Indies, and they had worked in relays. Just when they had completed their enormous haul, on the very evening that the _Jules Verne_ had arrived, the pirates had completed rifling the treasure ship. They had expected to sail the following morning early for a South American port, there to make away with their loot and dispose of their stolen ship. Weddigen had seen the _Jules Verne_ from his vantage point within the cove long before Captain Austin and his men knew of the presence of another craft at the old anchorage. But he had decided to wait until after midnight and make a run for it in the darkness. He had refused to answer the challenge of Captain Austin, although he recognized the voice of that official, hoping against hope he might get away unrecognized. Finally, when pressed for an explanation as to why he had foolishly gone aboard the _Jules Verne_ in the early morning hours and thus risked his chances of getting away at all by putting himself in the way of capture, Weddigen brazenly admitted he carried a powerful bomb with which he hoped to sink the salvage ship and her crew before they could sound an alarm. But in this he had been thwarted just as he was ready to set the bomb and leave the _Jules Verne_. Loudly the pirate chief had cursed the war dog Fismes and the two Brighton youths who, he said, had been his nemeses from the very first day he had met them. "Luckily for the United States Government and all parties concerned with the ownership of this gold bullion, there are such brave youths as Mr. Thacker and Mr. Monaghan," the revenue cutter captain told him.