Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 266, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 November 1917 — The Hanging Bough [ARTICLE]

The Hanging Bough

It Covered a Love * Affair

By Agnes G. Brogan

(Copyright, 1»17, Western Newspaper Union.) It had been a source of annoyance to Gordon from the moment he entered the well appointed new study and took ;Up his pen to write. Here in the seclusion of the country he had promised himself to finish undisturbed the book which should add to his fame. Everything had seemed propitious to that end—the small rented bungalow, its peaceful setting of silencing hills, the absence of interrogating friends. Old Martha, the housekeeper whom he had brought with him from the city, attended interrigently to”ail his wants. Now, into all this desirableness came the disturbing element, a great evergreen branch hanging like a screening curtain before his very windows. Against its thick fragrance the sun battled hopelessly, while the study remained in semi-gloom. If the bough had been attached to a tree upon his own lawn the matter might have been quickly righted, but the particular tree of this down hanging branch grew on his neighbor’s ground, upon the opposite side of the high garden wall. Gordon had carelessly noticed the place as he came along, the old crumbling house, the broken statuary and basins of its gardens bespeaking a time of grandeur long past. Disgustedly at last the author threw’ down his pen. “It’s no duse,” he told the attentivebut laconic Martha; “w® will have to move the study some place else.” •Toil could not write in the open living room.” she answered truly. The old bungalow’s space was limited: “Then I will ask them to cut the bough down.” he said, and paused perplexedly. “Who lives there?” "The name on the door stone is Stuyvesant,” Martha replied, “Peter Stiiyvesant That is all I know.” So Gordon decided to pen his request?'Being in an impatient frame of mind at the moment, his request was more in the nature of a demand. “The bough hanging before window,” he wrote, “causes me much Inconvenience and annoyance. I must ask that it be immediately removed. “J. Wesley Gordon.” he signed and remembered with satisfaction that there were few to whom the name was unknown.

Martha was dispatched with the note, returning soon to say that, as no one had responded to her ring, she had dropped the missive into the Stuyvesant mail box. Gordon was folding away the fragmentary work of an unsuccessful afternoon when the answer came, a faced lad being the bearer. “The impertinent old Dutchman! ’ he muttered, for this is what he read: “If you would prefer to have the left wing of our house removed just mention that als.>. P. Stuyv<>s.-mt/ - The scattered pages of his day’s work mockedhim. Duskily through the screening branch flickered a shifting light, and heatedly Gordon reached for. his pen. “If that bough,” he wrote, “is not cut down by 9 o'clock tomorrow, I will go over and do it myself.” This time he contented himself with signing merely the letters “J. W. G.” When the second note in Martha’s apron pocket was passing through the gateway broken in the garden wall, Gordon reflected that he had been rather hasty. The Dutchman’s imprudence to a “personality” had rather nettled him. For though the author would not admit the fact to himself, subservience had become a custom. Back through the broken gateway again came Martha, silently placing a responsive note in his hand. “Cut the branch down,” was scrawled in bold defiant script “Cut the branch down, if you dare! P. Stuyvesant.” Gordon’s brows came together angrily; then he laughed. “A threat eh?” he said; “all right.” He turned to the waiting Martha. “The affair becomes interesting,” he said. “I will now get out my gasoline buggy and run into town.” . „At the very end of the straggling village street he found a hardware shop and bought a saw, then he added to his purchase a small shining ax. He smiled grimly as his car slowed down nearing the great, shabby house next door. From a rear window shone a light. Gordon had a' mental picture of a fat, stubbom'Old Dutchman smoking his evening pipe in the kitchen. “Preparation for onslaught upon the tree of Peter Stuyvesant,” he explained to Martha, as he left his implements in the back hall. It. was in a long forgotten spirit of boyish adventure that he sought them next morning, and sauntered through the break in the stone wall. All was still. The old house and its garden presented an appearance of having been asleep for a hundred years. Gordon was glad he had put on tennis shoes; 'he would be able to climb up like a squirrel, and when the branch had fallen neatly he would carry it over and place it against their’veranda ptlings, to show his accomplished purpose. What had Stuyvesant meant by writing the, words, “if you dare." Did the fellow actually Intend to show fight? Gordon smiled involuntarily. Well, If he did, the author might “show him" that he had not forgotten college years of athletic training. He was ready; alniost, he was eager; .then Gordon stopped short in the path-

way. Crouched beneath the offending 4 evergreen tree was a bulldog, a huge, fierce jawed brute, its bloodshot eyes fixed upon the approaching author, its body trembling with rumbling, threatening sounds. So this was the “dare.” Strange the possibility had not occurred to him. To go forward farther was very evidently useless. In flight—at least for the present—lay Gordon's safety. Ignominiously he retreated. As he entered the hallway Martha’s eyes asked the question her lips would not. “I am going out later,” Gordon confusedly explained, “to cut the thing down.” But when he went out later the dog had advanced to* the gap in the wall, his lapping jaws seeming to speak disappointment in the ending of the fray. Gordon smoked his pipe for half an hour that evening in the shelter of the bungalow porch before ” deciding upon a further course of action. At last he got up and searched out an old revolver, overlooking its casings. Never before had its protection been needed. He shook his head seriously at old Martha. _ “With an ugly hrute like that across the way,” he explained. Then Gordon wrote his last note of warfare. “I am going over tomorrow to saw the branch from your tree. If the dog is there I shall shoot him on the spot. “J. W. GORDON.” Martha’s face was quite wfflite when she brought back the reply. “That dog,” she explained, “he sits under the tree and gro’wls. It makes me tremble to look at him.” - “The dog is a thoroughbred,” read the answering note. “If you shoot you will pay every*cent he is worth. It’s a good deal. “P. STUYVESANT.”

Gordon pondered. Some of these brutes, he realized, were worth thousands of dollars, and the animal being on itg QwnAr’g premises would make him- entirely accountable. It was a confounding situation. Nevertheless he ventured upon the following morning; but, while he was formidably -armed with saw and ax, the revolver reposed in a drawer of his desk—and the dog was not there. Gordon breathed a sigh of relief. So his threat had frightened old Peter, after all. It was no task at all to climb to the high base of the drooping branch. Easily he swung himself out upon a neighboring limb and fitted the saw. 4, panting sound attracted his attention and he glanced downward. The dog had arrived at his post in a mad rush. The author muttered an imprecation. So this was the plotted scheme to wait and pin him up there helplessly ? , He might aim the ax at the dog’s head 'of course, but the brute was a thoroughbred, and it might mean more perhaps than the launching of his new book Gordon bent down and whistled peaceably. A fierce growl followed. echoed suddenly by a girl s smothered laughter. The author wheeled about on his swaying limb. At the back of the tree stood a young woman. That she had been engaged in silent laughter was evident from the furtive dabs at her still glistening eyes. “Oh, dear!” gasped the girl. On, dear; it was so funny!” Gordon, speechless, was acutelj aware of the beauty of her mass of bronzed hair gleaming in the sunlight, of the full red lips parting in helpless has all been so funny,” she gurgled—“yesterday when you started over so bravely and—and retreated at the sign of the bulldog, and today when with all .those red. axes and things you came like a whole fire department.” She bent to caress the dog. “What shall we do with him. Bobs?” she asked wickedly. “The poor man is frightened to death.” , Gordon made a frantic effort for dignity as he clung to the uncertain bough. “I would like to speak to Peter Stuyvesant,!’ he said stiffly. \

The girl shook her head. “You can’t,” she told, him. “There isn’t any. Peter Stuyvesant was my grandfather. I never saw Mm. Bobs is the only relative I have. We come but to the old place to live every summer.” “But—but the note?” murmured Gordon, perplexed. ■■ The girl’s Pink cheeks grew pinker. “I wrote them.” she ’ confessed. “P. Stuyvesant—that means Polly.” For a long moment the girl’s blue eyes looked up into the man’s brown ones. “I had to.” she excused, “you were so cpmmanding.”* “I was,” agreed Gordon. Then the awful thing happened. Bending lower the better to see her face, the man lost his balance and fell, lying there a huddled body at her feet. After one sharp cry she brushed the* dog aside and raised Gordon’s suffering face in her hands. “Its my leg,” he said painfully; “broken, I guess.” And it was. Because the physician found it easier to move him into the old house, near by, Martha came down from the bungalow to care for him there. - So the days and the weeks drifted by. It was a very repentant and charming young woman who kept Gordon’s room sweet with flowers from her garden, who read to him through long afternoons, w’hd sang to him softly in enchanted twilights, whose hands at last clung to his tenderly, responsive, as he held them close to his own. “Dear,” he said to her one evening, whil; Bobs blinked affectionately at them both—“dear, we must come backhere every summer, and when you are my wife you shall fix place over-tp suit yqurselfy We will take down tlip stone and give to the house its'new flame.” ” Polly’s radiant eyes twinkled back at her lover. “We will call our summer home the Hanging Bough,” she said.