Bernt now had to mind the sail alone; and he and his father, as far as was possible, helped one another.  Elias dared not let go the tiller, and he held it firmly with a hand of iron that had long lost feeling from the strain.

After a while the companion boat appeared again; as before, it had been absent for a time.  Now, too, Elias saw more of the big man who sat in the stern in the same place as himself.  Out of his back, below the sou’wester, when he turned, stuck a six-inch-long iron spike which Elias thought he ought to know.  And now, in his own mind, he had come to a clear understanding upon two points:  one was that it was no other than the sea-goblin himself who was steering his half-boat by his side and was leading him to destruction, and the other, that it was so ordained that he was sailing his last voyage that night.  For he who sees the goblin on the sea is a lost man.  He said nothing to the others for fear of making them lose courage; but he silently committed his soul to God.

For the last few hours he had been obliged to go out of his course for the storm; the air too became thick with snow, and he saw that he would have to wait for dawn before he could find out his whereabouts.  In the meantime they sailed on.  Now and then the boys in the stern complained of the cold, but there was nothing to be done in the wet, and moreover Elias’s thoughts were of very different things.  He had such an intense desire for revenge, that, if he had not had the lives of his three remaining children to defend, he would have attempted by a sudden turn of his own boat to run into and sink the other, which still, as if in mockery, kept by his side, and whose evil object he understood only too well.  If the halibut pike could wound the goblin before, then surely a knife or a landing-hook might now, and he felt that he would gladly give his life for a good blow at the monster who had so unmercifully taken his dearest from him, and still wanted more victims.

Between three and four in the morning Elias saw, advancing through the dark, another foam-crest, so high that at first he thought they must be near breakers, close to land.  But he soon saw that it really was an enormous wave.  Then he fancied he distinctly heard laughter over in the other boat, and the words, “Now your boat will capsize, Elias!” Elias, who foresaw the disaster, said aloud:  “In Jesus’ name!” and told his sons to hold on, with all their might, to the willow bands on the rowlocks when the boat went under, and not to leave go until she rose again.  He made the elder boy go forward to Bernt; he himself held the younger close to him, quietly stroking his cheek, and assured himself that he had a good hold.  The boat was literally buried under the foam-drift, then gradually lifted at the bow, and went under.  When she rose again, keel uppermost, Elias, Bernt, and the twelve-year-old Martin still held on to the willow bands.  But the third brother was gone.