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:  ASCII

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Conjuror’shouse

>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’shouse

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 Abitibi.  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.