Presently the children took notice of the groanings and the words, and they ran to their father and said: “Those chests are bewitched. They are talking.”
The man thought a moment and said, “Forty-eight, and the one that brought them makes forty-nine!”
Then he went to the chests and put his ear to one of the keyholes. He heard the direful words and the groaning, and he said to himself, “Now that I have you monsters in my power I’ll make sure of you.”
So off he went and bought some iron rods, heated them red hot in his kitchen fire, and one by one thrust them into the chests until he had killed all the forty-eight dragons. That done, he called his servant, opened one of the chests, and said: “My man, look here. Some one has played us a trick and put a dragon in this chest. If I had not killed the creature it would have devoured us all. Take it and throw it into the sea.”
The servant lifted it on his back, went to the seashore, which was not far away, and threw the creature down where the rising tide would soon carry it away. Then he went home, but while he was gone his master had opened another chest. The man had his servant look in, and said: “Here is the dragon. Surely you did not throw it far enough out into the sea, else how would it have returned?”
Again the servant carried a dragon to the shore, and once more returned to find what was apparently the same dead dragon. His master kept him going nearly all night, and when he made the trip with the forty-eighth dragon he was so exasperated that he waded right into the sea and cast it out as far as he could. When he returned home, he said, “Master, is it back?”
“No,” the man answered, “it has not come back. You must have thrown it in very deep.”
Next morning the chief dragon came, and he was a good deal perturbed, because he had expected his dragons would destroy the family of the former poor man, and then join their chief before daylight at an appointed spot outside of the town. “I find that one of your chests is open and empty,” the man informed the dragon.
He led the way to the yard, and when the dragon bent over to look into the chest the man seized him and pushed him inside, slammed down the cover, and locked it. Then he ran for a red-hot iron, and soon the last of the dragons had perished.
The castle among the mountains was now without an owner, and the man took possession of it and lived there as happy as a prince—and may whoever reads this story, or hears it read, live happier still.