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