Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net 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 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.