Conjuror's House: A Romance of the Free ForestWhite, Stewart Edward
General
Conjuror's House: A Romance of the Free Forest
White, Stewart Edward
Canada, Northern -- Fiction
In the course of nature and of time Galen Albret had a daughter, but
lost a wife. It was no longer necessary for him to leave his wrong
unavenged. Then began a series of baffling hindrances which resulted
finally in his stooping to means repugnant to his open sense of what
was due himself. At the first he could not travel to his enemy because
of the child in his care; when finally he had succeeded in placing the
little girl where he would be satisfied to leave her, he himself was
suddenly and peremptorily called east to take a post in Rupert's Land.
He could not disobey and remain in the Company, and the Company was
more to him than life or revenge. The little girl he left in Sacre
Coeur of Quebec; he himself took up his residence in the Hudson Bay
country. After a few years, becoming lonely for his own flesh and
blood, he sent for his daughter. There, as Factor, he gained a vast
power; and this power he turned into the channels of his hatred.
Graehme Stewart felt always against him the hand of influence. His
posts in the Company's service became intolerable. At length, in
indignation against continued injustice, oppression, and insult, he
resigned, broken in fortune and in prospects. He became one of the
earliest Free Traders on the Saskatchewan, devoting his energies to
enraged opposition of the Company which had wronged him. In the space
of three short years he had met a violent and striking death; for the
early days of the Free Trader were adventurous. Galen Albret's
revenge had struck home.
Then in after years the Factor had again met with Andrew Levoy. The
man staggered into Conjuror's House late at night. He had started from
Winnipeg to descend the Albany River, but had met with mishap and
starvation. One by one his dogs had died. In some blind fashion he
pushed on for days after his strength and sanity had left him.
Mu-hi-kun had brought him in. His toes and fingers had frozen and
dropped off; his face was a mask of black frost-bitten flesh, in which
deep fissures opened to the raw. He had gone snow-blind. Scarcely was
he recognizable as a human being.
From such a man in extremity could come nothing but the truth, so
Galen Albret believed him. Before Andrew Levoy died that night he told
of his deceit. The Factor left the room with the weight of a crime on
his conscience. For Graehme Stewart had been innocent of any wrong
toward him or his bride.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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