CONJUROR'S HOUSE
beyond the white pine and the red, beyond
the oak, the cedar, and the beech, beyond
even the white and yellow birches lies a
Land, and in that Land the shadows fall
crimson across the snow.
Paul Gilmore,in "The Call of the North"—The dramaticversion of "Conjuror's House."
CONJUROR'S HOUSE
A Romance of the Free Forest
BY
Stewart Edward White
AUTHOR OF THE WESTERNERS,
THE BLAZED TRAIL,
ETC.
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS : NEW YORK
Copyright, 1903, by
STEWART EDWARD WHITE
Copyright, 1902, by Curtis Publishing Company
Published, March, 1903. R.
CONJUROR'S HOUSE
Chapter One
The girl stood on a bank above a river flowing north. At her backcrouched a dozen clean whitewashed buildings. Before her ininterminable journey, day after day, league on league into remoteness,stretched the stern Northern wilderness, untrodden save by thetrappers, the Indians, and the beasts. Close about the littlesettlement crept the balsams and spruce, the birch and poplar, behindwhich lurked vast dreary muskegs, a chaos of bowlder-splits, theforest. The girl had known nothing different for many years. Once a[2]summer the sailing ship from England felt its frozen way through theHudson Straits, down the Hudson Bay, to drop anchor in the mightyRiver of the Moose. Once a summer a six-fathom canoe manned by a dozenpaddles struggled down the waters of the broken Abítibi. Once a year alittle band of red-sashed voyageurs forced their exhaustedsledge-dogs across the ice from some unseen wilderness trail. That wasall.
Before her eyes the seasons changed, all grim, but one by the verypathos of brevity sad. In the brief luxuriant summer came the Indiansto trade their pelts, came the keepers of the winter posts to rest,came the ship from England bringing the articles of use or ornamentshe had ordered a full year before. Within a short time all were gone,into the wilderness, into the great unknown world. The snow fell; the[3]river and the bay froze. Strange men from the North glided silentlyto the Factor's door, bearing the meat and pelts of the seal. Bitteriron cold shackled the northland, the abode of desolation. Armies ofcaribou drifted by, ghostly under the aurora, moose, lordly andscornful, stalked majestically along the shore; wolves howledinvisible, or trotted dog-like in organized packs along the riverbanks. Day and night the ice artillery thundered. Night and day thefireplaces roared defiance to a fro