Conjurors House

Conjuror's House, by Stewart
Edward White

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Title: Conjuror's House A Romance of the Free Forest
Author: Stewart Edward White
Release Date: April 11, 2006 [EBook #18149]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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CONJUROR'S HOUSE
Beyond the butternut, beyond the maple, 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.

[Illustration: PAUL GILMORE, in "THE CALL OF THE
NORTH"--The dramatic version 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 back
crouched a dozen clean whitewashed buildings. Before her in
interminable journey, day after day, league on league into remoteness,
stretched the stern Northern wilderness, untrodden save by the trappers,
the Indians, and the beasts. Close about the little settlement crept the
balsams and spruce, the birch and poplar, behind which lurked vast
dreary muskegs, a chaos of bowlder-splits, the forest. The girl had
known nothing different for many years. Once a summer the sailing
ship from England felt its frozen way through the Hudson Straits, down
the Hudson Bay, to drop anchor in the mighty River of the Moose.
Once a summer a six-fathom canoe manned by a dozen paddles
struggled down the waters of the broken Abítibi. Once a year a little
band of red-sashed voyageurs forced their exhausted sledge-dogs
across the ice from some unseen wilderness trail. That was all.
Before her eyes the seasons changed, all grim, but one by the very
pathos of brevity sad. In the brief luxuriant summer came the Indians to
trade their pelts, came the keepers of the winter posts to rest, came the
ship from England bringing the articles of use or ornament she 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 river and
the bay froze. Strange men from the North glided silently to the
Factor's door, bearing the meat and pelts of the seal. Bitter iron cold
shackled the northland, the abode of desolation. Armies of caribou
drifted by, ghostly under the aurora, moose, lordly and scornful, stalked
majestically along the shore; wolves howled invisible, or trotted
dog-like in organized packs along the river banks. Day and night the ice
artillery thundered. Night and day the fireplaces roared defiance to a
frost they could not subdue, while the people of desolation crouched
beneath the tyranny of winter.
Then the upheaval of spring with the ice-jams and terrors, the Moose
roaring by untamable, the torrents rising, rising foot by foot to the very
dooryard of her father's house. Strange spirits were abroad at night,
howling, shrieking, cracking and groaning in voices of ice and flood.

Her Indian nurse told her of them all--of Maunabosho, the good; of
Nenaubosho the evil--in her lisping Ojibway dialect that sounded like
the softer voices of the forest.
At last the sudden subsidence of the waters; the splendid eager
blossoming of the land into new leaves, lush grasses, an abandon of
sweetbrier and hepatica. The air blew soft, a thousand singing birds
sprang from the soil, the wild goose cried in triumph. Overhead shone
the hot sun of the Northern summer.
From the wilderness came the brigades bearing their pelts, the hardy
traders of the winter posts, striking hot the imagination through the
mysterious and lonely allurement of their callings. For a brief season,
transient as the flash of a loon's wing on the shadow of a lake, the post
was bright with the thronging of many people. The Indians pitched
their wigwams on the broad meadows below the bend; the half-breeds
sauntered about, flashing bright teeth and wicked dark eyes at whom it
might concern; the traders gazed stolidily over their little black pipes,
and uttered brief sentences through their thick black beards.
Everywhere was gay sound--the fiddle, the laugh, the song; everywhere
was gay color--the red sashes of the