But Jack got so great and mighty that it was not advisable for any one to thwart him, or interfere where he ruled and reigned.

Whole rows of silver dollars stood in the barrels in the loft, and his boat-building establishment stretched over all the islands of Sjoeholm.

One Sunday his brothers and merry little Malfri had gone to church in the Femboering.  When evening came, and they hadn’t come home, the boatman came in and said that some one had better sail out and look after them, as a gale was blowing up.

Jack was sitting with a plumb-line in his hand, taking the measurements of a new boat, which was to be bigger and statelier than any of the others, so that it was not well to disturb him.

“Do you fancy they’re gone out in a rotten old tub, then?” bellowed he.  And the boatman was driven out as quickly as he had come.

But at night Jack lay awake and listened.  The wind whined outside and shook the walls, and there were cries from the sea far away.  And just then there came a knocking at the door, and some one called him by name.

“Go back whence you came,” cried he, and nestled more snugly in his bed.

Shortly afterwards there came the fumbling and the scratching of tiny fingers at the door.

“Can’t you leave me at peace o’ nights?” he bawled, “or must I build me another bedroom?”

But the knocking and the fumbling for the latch outside continued, and there was a sweeping sound at the door, as of some one who could not open it.  And there was a stretching of hands towards the latch ever higher and higher.

But Jack only lay there and laughed.  “The Femboerings that are built at Sjoeholm don’t go down before the first blast that blows,” mocked he.

Then the latch chopped and hopped till the door flew wide open, and in the doorway stood pretty Malfri and her mother and brothers.  The sea-fire shone about them, and they were dripping with water.

Their faces were pale and blue, and pinched about the corners of the mouth, as if they had just gone through their death agony.  Malfri had one stiff arm round her mother’s neck; it was all torn and bleeding, just as when she had gripped her for the last time.  She railed and lamented, and begged back her young life from him.

So now he knew what had befallen them.

Out into the dark night and the darker weather he went straightway to search for them, with as many boats and folk as he could get together.  They sailed and searched in every direction, and it was in vain.

But towards day the Femboering came drifting homewards bottom upwards, and with a large hole in the keel-board.

Then he knew who had done the deed.

But since the night when the whole of Jack’s family went down, things were very different at Sjoeholm.

In the daytime, so long as the hammering and the banging and the planing and the clinching rang about his ears, things went along swimmingly, and the frames of boat after boat rose thick as sea fowl on an AEggevaer.[14]