The husband had resigned his office and was gone, no one knew where.
A few years later Mrs.Houston applied for a divorce, which in those days had to be granted by the state legislature.

Inevitably reports derogatory to her had got abroad.

Almost the first tidings of Governor Houston's whereabouts were contained in a letter he wrote from somewhere in the Indian country to my father, a member of the legislature to whom Mrs.Houston had applied, in which he said that these reports had come to his ears.

"They are," he wrote, "as false as hell.

If they be not stopped I will return to Tennessee and have the heart's blood of him who repeats them.