Mans Nilsson held with the Danes, but he was no traitor, and he showed the fellow the door.  He went next to the King’s sheriff; he would be bound to help.  To be sure, he would claim the lion’s share of the blood-money, but something was better than nothing.  The sheriff came soon enough with a score of armed men.  But Arendt Persson had not reckoned with his honest wife.  She guessed his errand and let Gustav down from the window to the rear gate, where she had a sleigh and team in waiting.  When the sheriff’s posse surrounded the house, Gustav was well on his way to Master Jon, the parson of Svaerdsjoe, who was his friend.  Tradition has it that while Christian was King, the brave little woman never dared show her face in the house again.

Master Jon was all right, but news of the man-hunt had run through the country, and when the parson’s housekeeper one day saw him hold the wash-bowl for his guest she wanted to know why he was so polite to a common clod.  Master Jon told her that it was none of her business, but that night he piloted his friend across the lake to Isala, where Sven Elfsson lived, a gamekeeper who knew the country and could be trusted.  The good parson was hardly out of sight on his way back when the sheriff’s men came looking for Gustav.  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.  Bitter sorrow filled his soul at the plight of his country that had fallen so low.  But the hope of the young years came to the rescue:  all was not lost yet.  And in the morning came Sven, the gamekeeper, with a load of straw, at the bottom of which he hid him.  So no one would be the wiser.