"A wife!" said Hooch. "Well, I'll be! I beg your pardon, Governor, that wasn't what I heard, you'll have to forgive me, I was only going by what the—what the rumors said."

"Rumors?" asked Harrison

"Oh, no, you just never mind. You know how soldiers talk. I'm ashamed I listened to them in the first place. Why, you've kept the memory of your first wife sacred all these years, and if I was any kind of friend of yours, I would've known any woman you took into your house would be a lady, and a properly married wife."

"What I want to know," said Harrison, "is who told you she was anything else?"

"Now, Bill, it was just loose soldiers' talk; I don't want any man to get in trouble because he can't keep his tongue. A likker shipment just came in, for heaven's sake, Bill! You won't hold it against them, what they said with their minds on whisky. No, you just take a pinch of this tobacky and remember that your boys all like you fine."

Harrison took a good-sized chaw from the offered tobacco pouch and tucked it into his cheek. "Oh, I know, Hooch, they don't bother me." But Hooch knew thatit did bother him, that Harrison was so angry he couldn't spit straight, which he proved by missing the spittoon. A spittoon, Hooch noticed, which had been sparkling clean. Didn't anybody spit around here anymore, except Hooch?

"You're getting civilized," said Hooch. "Next thing you know you'll have lace curtains."

"Oh, I do," said Harrison. "In my house."

"And little china chamber pots?"

"Hooch, you got a mind like a snake and a mouth like a hog."

"That's why you love me, Bill—cause you got a mind like a hog and a mouth like a snake."

"Keep that in mind," said Harrison. "You just keep that in mind, how I might bite, and bite deep, and bite with poison in it. You keep that in mind before you try to play your diddly games with me."