It did not
occur to them that the yokel who stood warming himself by the stove
might be the man they were after. But the gamekeeper's wife was
quick to see his peril. She was baking bread and had just put the
loaves into the oven with a long-handled spade. "Here, you lummox!"
she cried, and whacked him soundly over the back with it, "what are
ye standing there gaping at? Did ye never see folks afore? Get back
to your work in the barn." And Gustav, taking the hint, slunk out of
the room.
For three days after that he lay hidden under a fallen tree in the
snow and bitter cold; but even there he was not safe, and the
gamekeeper took him deeper into the forest, where a big spruce grew
on a hill in the middle of a frozen swamp. There no one would seek
him till he could make a shift to get him out of the country. The
hill is still there; the people call it the King's Hill, and not
after King Christian, either. But in those long nights when Gustav
Vasa listened to the hungry wolves howling in the woods and nosing
about his retreat, it was hardly kingly conceits his mind brooded
over. His father and kinsmen were murdered; his mother and sister in
the pitiless grasp of the tyrant who was hunting him to his death;
he, the last of his race, alone and forsaken by his own.
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