They are a tranquil people who pass their days as do those who now live in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." They are free from invidious jealousies and the blight of avarice toward each other, free from doubt of the rectitude of their daughters and relieved from solicitude that the future of their sons, if they remain in the valley, will be influenced by dissipation or dishonesty—a people who find in the changes of the weather and its effect upon crops their chief cause for worry.

Through the gray dawn the farmer looks up to the skies for his weather report for the day. As he works he watches the clouds scurrying across the mountaintops, and when he notes they are banking against the unseen summit of the Blue Mountains that rises to the east, he knows that rain is soon to come. Some local unknown bard, watching those banking clouds, has left a lyric to his people, and I heard a gray-bearded mountaineer singing it as he predicted the break of a summer drought:

With their homes back in the mountains nearly fifty miles from the railway, with a journey before them over rocky roads and up mountainsides to the other communities of Fentress county, the people of Pall Mall live in the communion and democracy of one great family. Children call old men by their Christian names. In it is not the slightest element of disrespect, and it is instead an appreciated propriety which the old men recall as the custom of their boyhood. Rev. R. C. Pile, pastor of the Church of Christ in Christian Union, the church of the valley, is "Rosier" to everyone. All worship together in the same church; all toil alike in the fields. In the predial, peaceful routine of their days there is a positive similarity. A farmer will ride direct to the cornfield or the meadow of a neighbor, knowing the neighbor will be found at work there. And, as through the gray dawn of the day they look up to the skies, the wish of one for rain will be found to be the community desire.

The social meeting-point of the people of the valley is the general store of John Marion Rains. The storehouse sits by the roadside at the foot of a mountain in the western end of the valley, just where the road tumbles down to the solid log cabin old Coonrod Pile had built, to the spring and the York home.

One end of the long porch of the store-house, as it runs with the road, is but a step from the ground, and the mountain falls away until the floor is conveniently up to the height of a wagon's bed; then the road dips again until the porch is on a level with the saddle-stirrups and the women dismount with ease from their high-backed, tasseled side-saddles as they come in sunbonnets and ginghams.

The men of the mountains seldom hurry on any mission. Their walk is a slow and foot-sure tread. When they come to the store, if only for a plug of tobacco, they remain with John Marion for a social hour or more. Their purchase is an incident, the last act before they depart.

It is rare during the daylight hours that someone is not sitting on the porch, or in one of the chairs of the row that skirts the show-cased counter just within the door, or somewhere upon the open horseshoe kegs that border the floor of the counter opposite. They are waiting to hear if anything new has happened, for all the news of the neighborhood comes to the store. The storekeeper is sure to know whether the stranger seen passing along the road in the morning stopped at the York's, or went on to Possum Trot or to Byrdstown.

The very commodities upon the shelves and counters of that store are in friendly confusion. Canned meats, pepper, candy, soap and chewing-tobacco may be found in one partition; while next to them, groceries, shotgun-shells, powder and chinaware are in a position of prominence according to the needs of the past purchaser. In the rear, piled high, are overalls and "store clothes," hats and shoes.

But the counter, facing the shelves of dress-goods for the women, is free of obstructions, and its surface is worn smooth and polished by the years of unrolling of bolts of cloth, while at every quarter-yard along the counter's rear edge is a shining brass tack-head—the yardstick of the department. A pair of large shears swing prominently from an upright partition. The department is orderly and neat, a mute tribute to those who patronize it.

Into the show-cases has crept every article of small dimension that had no habitat or kind upon the shelves around—from laces to lead pencils. Upon nails in the rafters of the ceiling swing buckets and dippers and lamps, currycombs and brushes.

Off in an L that runs at a right angle from the main store are bacon and tires for wagon wheels, country-cured hams and brooms, flour, kerosene and plows.

Under the counter by the door is an open wooden box of crackers, and its exact location and the volume of the supply are known to every child in the mountains around. Out of it comes their lagnappe for making a journey to the store.

Beside the door upon a shelf sits the water-bucket, kept cool by frequent replenishing from the York spring. Here every man who enters stops; and, after he has shifted his quid of tobacco, looked around, and made his cheerful greeting a hearty one with, "Howdy people!" he lifts the dipper filled with its pleasing refreshment—and the surplus goes accurately, in a crystal curve, to the back of some venturesome chicken that has come upon the store porch.

Above the door as you enter hangs a stenciled, uneven, unpunctuated sign, "NO CREDIT CASH OR BARTER." But that sign has lost its potency. It is yellow with age and no longer is there anyone who believes in it. It was hung when John Marion first opened his store, and before he knew his people and wanted cash or barter for his wares.

There is trading every day that is barter. But it is the women bringing chickens under their arms, or it basket of eggs. The eggs are deposited in a box, the storekeeper counting them aloud as he packs them for shipment; or one of the eleven Rains' "kids" is bestirred to the barn with the chickens, where they remain in semi-captivity until the egg and poultry man, in an old canvas covered schooner, comes on his weekly rounds. And the cash value to the barter is traded to a cent. A "poke" of flour or of sugar or a cut of tobacco usually evens the transaction.

It is many a journey around the store that John Marion makes in a day. The decision to purchase each article is announced slowly and as tho it were the only thing desired. The plump and genial storekeeper goes leisurely for it, and with a smile of satisfaction places it before the customer. There is a moment of silence, then a journey for the next need, and it is only in balancing the barter that the merchant makes a suggestion.

In a small glass show-case is refuting testimony that the sign over the door of NO CREDIT had been discredited long ago. The charge account is open to everyone. A memorandum of the purchase is made upon a strip torn from a writing-tablet or upon a piece of wrapping-paper and tossed into the show-case, among many others of its kind, until the customer "comes around to settle up." Then, with an unerring instinct, John Marion can pull from the tumbled pile of memoranda the records of the charges he seeks. If the charge account is to remain open until the next crop comes in, on some rainy day he will transcribe the charge to his day-book.

The clocks of the valley are not controlled by the government's or the railroads' standard of time. They go by "sun time" and are regulated by the hour the almanacs say the sun should rise. John Marion winds the store clock after it has run down and he sets it by no consultation with anything but his feeling as to what hour of the day it should be.

At least once a week every man who lives in the valley is at the store, but Saturday is the popular meeting-time. When the chairs and the row of horseshoe kegs are occupied, the men rest their hands behind them on the counter and swing to a place of comfort upon it, or they sit upon the window-sills, keeping well within the range of raillery that welcomes the coming and speeds the parting guest. It is a good-natured humor that these mountaineers love, quick as the crack of a rifle and as direct as its speeding ball. There is never an effort to wound. But always there is the open challenge to measure resource and wit.

Many a trade in mules that owners have ridden to the store has resulted from the defense against the mule-wise critics who several times outnumber the man who rode the mule. If the mount is a newly acquired one, especial pleasure is found in a seemingly serious pointing out why any sort of trade was a bad one for that particular animal.

A mule trade is a measure of business capability. No lie is ever told in answer to a direct question, but no information is relinquished unless a question is asked. If no hand is passed over the mule's eyes, and there is no specific inquiry about the eyes before the trade is consummated, and the animal proves blind in one of them, the fault lies in the mule-swapping ability of the new owner. Over no question could two men be seemingly so widely apart as the two when both are anxious to trade. They are jockeying for that "something to boot" which always makes at least one participant satisfied in a mountain mule trade.

There are pitfalls for the unwary in the conversations that pass across the store aisle. Bill Sharpe, who has spent eighty-two summers in the valley—and the winters, as well—with seeming innocence started a discussion as to how far a cow-bell could be heard. He sat quietly as several compared their experiences while hunting cattle in the mountains. Finally the old man said his hearing was not so good as it used to be, but he remembered once "hearing a cow-bell all the way from Overton county." Down the line a rural statistician figured it must be seventy miles from Pall Mall to the nearest point in Overton county, and the jests began to explode in the old man's vicinity. He conceded many changes since he was young, but so far as he could see there was evidently no improvement in man's hearing powers. When all his efforts to secure a side bet that he could prove his assertion were futile, he explained:

"Wall, boys, ye got away. En once I won two gallons o' whisky on hit. I was in Overton county. I bought a cow. As she had a bell on her, and I drove her home, I heard that cow-bell all the way from Overton county."

On Saturday afternoon, or a rainy afternoon, when Alvin York and the "Wright boys," and one of them, "Will" Wright, is president of the bank at Jamestown; Ab Williams, gray of hair and bent, but vigorous of tongue; his son, Sam Williams, tall and straight as an Indian and equally upstanding for his opinions; John Evans, a local justice of the peace; Bill Sharpe, who lives in the shadow of "Old Crow"; T. C. Frogge, of Frogge's Chapel, who farms, preaches or teaches school as the demand arises; "Paster" Pile and his brother, Virgil Pile, who has been County Trustee; when any of these are among those gathered at the store, there is a tournament of wit, with a constant change of program.

Many a time John Marion is compelled to retreat behind a grin when in a lull "a shot" is taken at him, and his smile is his acknowledgment that he cannot be expected to add up a charge-slip and at the same time defend himself against a care-free man upon a keg of horseshoes.

But the storekeeper is never taken by surprize at the badinage of his patrons. One afternoon after a long wait and another day in the valley seemed sure to pass with no unusual incident, an old fellow arose from one of the chairs, stretched himself, and said:

"John Marion, I want a shift o' shirts. Else, I got to go to bed to git this-un washed."

The storekeeper laid out several of dark color:

"Here's some you can wear without change till the shirt falls off."

"That's right, John; gimme one thet won't advertise thet the ole woman's neglectin' me."

Another was uncertain about the size of a pair of overalls for his boy:

"Dunknow, John Marion! One tight enough to keep the bees out—a kid shore wastes energy when a bee gits in 'em."

When it is "good dusk" the storekeeper closes the wooden shutters and fastens them by looping a small cotton string over a nail. All the mountaineers are on their way home, but they had not parted without an interchange of invitation:

"Home with me, boys; home! Ef I can't feed ye well, I'll be friendly."

Or, maybe, the invitation is not so sweeping, and holds a reservation:

"Spend the night with me! I'll not stop you; I'll let you leave afore breakfast."

Over any gathering at the store a pall of silence descends when a stranger rides up. If the newcomer is a new drummer unfamiliar with the ways of the mountains, if he comes imbued with the belief that the voice with the smile wins, and talkatively radiates his individual idea of fellowship and democracy, one by one his auditors silently drop away. To them, an insincere, a false note of democracy has been struck. Perhaps around the door there will linger some of the mountain boys waiting to satisfy their curiosity over the contents of the drummer's cases.

John Marion Rains always listens to the story of prices, but his shelves are really replenished by the drummers who drive to the barn instead of the store, who unhitch their own horses and feed them from the storekeeper's supply of corn, who come into the center of the crowd only after they have unobtrusively lingered awhile in the fringe of it.

One afternoon one of these mountaineers who had withdrawn to the porch, unhitched, without being solicited, a drummer's horse, and he had trouble in pulling off a loose shoe and renailing it. The drummer wanted to pay for the work, but the mountaineer shook his head. The deed had been done for the horse. The visitor insisted, and finally the price was fixed:

"Bout a nickel!"

A mountaineer seldom asks questions. Instead he makes a statement of that which appears to him to be the fact, and if unchallenged or uncorrected, it is accepted as the proper deduction. Early in my visit to Pall Mall I learned my lesson.

"Have you lived all your life in the valley?" I asked an old mountaineer whom I met on the road as he was carrying on his shoulder a sack of corn to the mill.

Into his eye there came a light of playfulness, then pity, quickly to be followed by a twinkle of fun. He simply could not let the opening pass.

"Not yit," he said.

Later I saw a little fellow of six years of age chasing a chicken barren of feathers over a yard that was barren of grass. When I accused him of maliciously picking that chicken, his face was a spot of smiles as he vigorously denied it.

"Are you going to school?" I asked him.

The smile changed to a look of surprize at an inquiry so out of line with his immediate activities.

"When it starts," he called back as he and the chicken disappeared under the cabin.

I dropped questions and adopted the direct statement as a method of procedure in which there was less personal liability.

Alvin Terry, dressed in a patched corduroy with a hunting-pouch made of the skin of a gray fox and with his long rifle in his hand, stopped at the store and told how he "got a bear." There was a hunter's pride in the achievement with apparently little value given to the bravery of the personal role he had played.

He had been on a hunt back in the hills. His dogs had gone ahead of him and he "knowed they had somethin'." When he came in sight of them they rushed into a cave and some came out yelping and bloody. When they wouldn't go back, then it was he "sized hit wur a bear." He looked at the mountains around him, but there was not a cabin in sight where he could get help.

"Ez the dogs couldn't git out whatever wuz in there, and wuz only keepin' hit in, I sat down to think hit over. I lowed I would tell some one en folks would say, 'that's the man who had a bear in a cave, and did not git him.' Ef I went in en come out alive with scratches on me, folks would say 'a bear done that, but he got the bear.'"

He cut a long pole, fastened a pine knot to the end of it and set it afire. Getting to the side of the mouth of the cave he began slowly to push in the burning knot, "leavin' the channel open ef anything wanted to come out."

But the bear didn't come out, and the hunter grew afraid that the smoke would not move his prey yet would prevent him seeing around in the cave if he had to go in. The cave's mouth was low, a rock hung over it and he could not crawl upon his hands and knees.

"I pushed the pine knot ez fur ez hit would go. I set my rifle, en pushed hit ahead of me. Got my knife where I could git hit. Went down flat en begun to pull myself on my elbows. When I could jes peep around a rock I seed the bear. He wuz settin' on his haunches, his head turned alookin' at the pine knot. I picked out a spot about three inches below his collar-bone, en never drew such a bead on anything. Then I tetched her oft. Ye should have seed me come backward out o' there."

He waited and there was no sound in the cave. He sent the dogs in and they would not come out at his call. He reloaded his rifle and began to crawl in again.

"As soon as I seed him I knowed he wuz dead. I got both hands on his paw and began to pull. He wuz heavier than I wuz, so I slid to him. I tried ketchin' my toes in the rocks, but I couldn't hold, en I never moved him."

He went ten miles over the mountains to get help to pull his bear out of the cave.

The language of the people of the Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge mountains is filled with a quaintness of expression. Many of their words and phrases that attract through their oddity were at one time in popular use and grammatically correct. These people are clinging to the dialect of their fathers who were Anglo-Saxons. The use of "hit" for "it" is not confined to the mountains, but the Old English grammars give "hit" as the neuter of the pronoun "he."

"Uns," too, had once a grammatical sanction, for "uon" or "un" was the Early English for "one," and "uns" was more than the one. In many parts of the South are found the expressions, "you-uns" and "we-uns." The mountaineer says "you-uns" when he is addressing more than one person. It is one of his plural forms for "you," and he is adopting an Early English ending. But the true mountaineer does not employ "we-uns" The "we" to him is plural, the suffix is superfluous. In the same way he says "ye" when speaking to more than one, but he uses "you" when addressing an individual. He seems, too, to make a distinction between "you-uns" and "ye." The former is usually the nominative and the latter the objective.

When he wishes to convey the idea of past tense, the ending "ed" is popularly employed, but when he may he drops the "e." While he will properly use the present tense of a verb he goes out of his way to add the "(e)d." So he says "know-d," "see-d." But he is not always consistent. He prefers "kilt," the old form, to "killed."

Generations passed in which they had little opportunity to attend school, and there are today a number of the older people of the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" who can not read nor write. Some of the younger generation have been away to college, but, as with Alvin York, most of them grew to manhood with only a month or a month and a half at school during a year, with many years no school in session.

The church is in the center of the valley at the edge of a grove of forest trees. It is a frame structure, built by the Methodists during the past century. The board walls of the interior are unplastered and unpainted, and the pews are movable benches. The pulpit is slightly elevated with a railing in front, ending in two pillars upon which rest the preacher's Bible, song books and lamps. Along the entire front of the pulpit runs the mourners' bench. In the rear of the church a ladder rests against the wall and down toward it swings a rope from the open belfry.

Everyone in the valley attends church and there are but few who do not go to every service without regard to the denomination conducting it. They come on horse- and mule-back, on foot, in wagons in the beds of which are chairs for the entire family. In summer many of the men wear their overalls, and all, excepting the young men acting as escorts, come in their shirt-sleeves. Some of the women are in silks, but more of them are in ginghams, and many sunbonnets are to be seen. At the door of the church the men and women part and they sit in separate pews.

I attended a service at the end of a revival that was being conducted by the Rev. Melvin Herbert Russell, of the Church of Christ in Christian Union, the frail and eager evangelist who three years before had brought Sergeant York to his knees before the altar of that church.

It was an August day and the sun's rays fell into the valley without a single cloud for a screen. The little church was filled with worshipers, while many sat in the shade of the trees that sheltered it, within the sound of the minister's voice. Down through the grove the hitched horses "stomped" and switched, but this was the only evidence of restlessness.

The minister conducted the services in his shirt-sleeves, without collar, and with the sleeves rolled up. There is no organ in the church and he played a guitar as he led the earnest singing.

The mountain evangelist had but few of the pulpit arts of the minister, but he had the soul of a great preacher. His life, to him, was a mission to the unconverted to point out the imminence of death and its meaning. His belief had carried him beyond and above the pleading of the uncertainty of death to arouse fear in the hearts of his congregation. Instead, to him, the great clock of time was actually ticking off an opportunity which the unconverted could not permit to pass. In his earnest pleading his voice would rise from a conversational tone until it rang penetratingly through the hall, and he would emphasize his words with a startling resound from his open palm upon the altar-rail.

The mountaineers had brought their entire families, and during the service the smaller children would fall asleep, to awaken with a cry at the changing vibrations. Up and down the sounding, carpetless aisles the parents would pass, carrying out some child to comfort it.

But the incidents were unnoticed by the minister, nor did they break the chant of amens or the growing number of repetitions of the minister's words by the devout worshipers. When the eyes of the auditors were turned from the evangelist they reverently sought the face of some expected convert. In the service, in the feelings of the people there was real religion.

Sundays pass when there is no preaching in the church. Pastor Pile, the local minister, has several charges and can conduct the services at Pall Mall but once a month. But each Sunday morning there is Sunday School, and in the afternoon a singing-class. Some one of the York boys leads the unaccompanied songs, and Alvin's leadership and interest in these services caused the catchy phrase, "a singing Elder," to be a part of nearly every newspaper story of him that went over the country.

The singing-class draws to the church on Sunday afternoon the younger element of the community. When the service is over, some go for a swim in the Wolf River which runs along the foot of the grove, or on a grassless space under a giant oak on the schoolhouse-yard there will be a game of marbles. It is the old-fashioned "ring men" that they play, where five large marbles are placed in a small square marked in the dust, one marble on each corner and one in the middle.

Over in France when the officers of Sergeant York's regiment were trying to obtain all the facts of his wonderful exploit, they asked him what he did with the German officers he had captured when he started to bring in his line of prisoners. His reply was a simile from his boyhood in the mountains:

"I jes made a middler out of myself."

The death of his father when Alvin was twenty-one, relaxed a hand that had protected and guided him more than he realized. His two older brothers were married and he became the head of the family of ten that remained. He left to his younger brothers the care of the crops upon the farm and he hired out on any job that brought an extra revenue. In summer he worked on neighboring farms, and in winter hauled staves and merchandise when the roads could be traveled, or logged in the lumber camps.

He formed new associates and under the new influences began to drink and gamble. With his companions on Saturday and Sunday he would "go to the Kentucky line."

Through the mountains along the state-line between Tennessee and Kentucky there were road-houses, or saloons, that were so built that one-half of the house would be in Kentucky and one-half in Tennessee. The keeper paid his federal license and was free from the clutches of the United States Government. But he avoided the licenses of the states by carrying a customer from Tennessee into the Kentucky side of the house for the business transaction, and the Kentuckian was invited into Tennessee. No customer of the state-line saloons could swear before a grand jury that he had violated the liquor laws of his state, and he was not subject to a summons at his home by the grand jury of the county or state in which he made his purchase. Upon receipt of a "grapevine" signal that officers were approaching, the entire stock of liquids would disappear and when the officers arrived the saloonkeeper would be at work in the fields of his farm.

The nearest state-line saloon to Pall Mall was seven miles by the road and but little over half the distance by paths on the mountains.

This was the only period of Alvin's life when the wishes of his mother did not control him. These week-end sprees were relaxation and fun, and he worked steadily the remainder of the week. In them he grew jovial and the friends he drew around him were fun, not trouble, makers. His physical strength and the influence of his personality were quickly used to check in incipiency any evidence of approaching disorder.

His "shooting-up" consisted of pumping lead from an old revolver he owned into the spots on beech trees as he and his friends galloped along the road. And he became so expert that he would pass the revolver from hand to hand and empty it against a tree as he went by. When the eight Germans charged him in the fight in the Argonne, he never raised his automatic pistol higher than his cartridge-belt.

His mother knew the latent determination of her boy and she was ever in dread that there might arise some trouble among the men when he was away on these drinking trips.

"Alvin is jes like his father," she said. "They were both slow to start trouble, but ef either one would git into hit, they'd go through with the job and there'd be a-hurtin'."

But since the fist fights of boyhood Alvin York has never had a personal encounter. His intents and deeds do not lead him into difficulties, and in his eye there is a calm blue light that steadies the impulses of men given to explosions of passion and anger.

At a basket-dinner where he and his friends were drinking he took his last drink. To these outings the girls bring, in a woven, hickory basket, a dinner for two. The baskets are auctioned, the proceeds are given to some church charity, and the purchaser and the girl have dinner together. They are often expensive parties to a serious-minded mountain swain who can not surrender the day's privileges to a rival or will not yield his dignity and rights to fun-makers who enliven the biddings by making the basket, brought by "his girl," cost at least as much as a marriage license.

Alvin's mother had often pleaded with her boy that he was not his real self—not his better self—while drinking. Something happened at a basket-party in 1914 that caused the full meaning of his mother's solicitude to come to him. He left, declaring he would never take another drink, and his drinking and gambling days ended together.

Late in the afternoons in the fall months, when the squirrels are out [so the story runs in the valley, but without confirmation from the Sergeant], Alvin would be seen leaving home with his gun. He would cut across the fields to the west and pass along the outskirts of the farm of Squire F. A. Williams. Those who saw him wondered why he should take this long course to the woods, while on the mountain above his home the oak and beech masts were plentiful and other hunters were going there for the squirrels.

About this same time, the wife of Squire Williams noted with pleasure that Gracie, her youngest daughter—a girl of sixteen with golden hair and eyes that mirror the blue of the sky—went willingly to the woodlots for the cows. When she returned with them she was singing, and this, too, pleased Mrs. Williams.

The road from Squire Williams' home to the church passes the York home; and, after the service, as far as his gate, Alvin would often walk with them. As Gracie was silent and timid when any stranger was near, so diffident that when on their way home from church she walked far away from Alvin, the neighbors for a long while had no explanation for Alvin's squirrel-hunts along the base of the mountain instead of up toward the top of it; and Mrs. Williams, at her home, heard so many gunshots off in the woods in the course of a day that she attached no significance to them.

But Alvin's and Gracie's meetings along the shaded roadway that leads to the Williams home were discovered, and Mrs. Williams put a ban upon them—for Gracie was too young, she maintained, to have thoughts of marriage.

The real facts in that mountain courtship are known to but two, and even now are as carefully guarded as tho the romance had not become a reality and culminated happily.

But the neighbors have fragments out of which they build a story, and it varies with the imagination of the relator. The big Sergeant's confirmation or denial is a smile and a playful, taunting silence that leaves conclusion in doubt.

There is a path that leads from the store around the side of the mountain that edges a shoulder between the store and the Williams home. A little off this path is a large flat rock. Around it massive beech trees grow and their boughs arch into a dome above the rock. There are carvings on the trunks of those trees that were not found until the rock was selected as the altar for a woodland wedding at which the Governor of Tennessee officiated.

When Gracie would come to the store she passed the York home on her way. Often, when alone, she would return by the mountain path. It was longer than by the road, but it was shaded by trees, and as it bends around the mountain glimpses of the valley could be seen. The rock ledge among the beech trees was not half way to her home, but it was a picturesque place to rest, and down below was the roof of the York home and the spring-branch, as it wound its way to the Wolf River. It was their favorite meeting-place.

When the war broke in Europe, those who lived in the valley gave little heed to it. When there was talk of the United States' entry, there was deep opposition. They were opposed to any war. The wounds of the Civil War had healed, but the scars it left were deep. The thought of another armed conflict meant more to the old people than it did to the younger generation.

"I did not know," Alvin said of himself, "why we were going to war. We never had any speakings in here, and I did not read the papers closely, and did not know the objects of the war. I did not feel I wanted to go."

He had given up his work on the farm and was making more money than he had ever made before. The shortcut of the Dixie Highway—that part that runs from Louisville to Chattanooga—had been surveyed and was being graded through Fentress county. It runs through the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf," He was "driving steel on the pike," for his days in the blacksmith shop had taught him to wield a sledgehammer and many rocks were to be blasted to make a roadway. For this he was receiving $1.65 a day, for ten hours' work, while on the farm he had not been able to earn more than $25 a month, working from "can't see to can't see."

When he joined the church he had given himself to it unreservedly. They were holding many meetings and the church was growing. He had become the Second Elder. At the time, too, he was planning for the day when he could marry.

In June following the country's entry into the war Alvin registered for the draft and in October at Jamestown took his examination.

"They looked at me, they weighed me," he told on his return, "and I weighed 170 pounds and was 72 inches tall. So they said I passed all right!"

He was with Pastor Pile, and he turned to him:

"This means good-bye for me. But I'll go."

After his registration his mother had never ceased to worry over his going to a war so far away from her.

The situation troubled him. At times he would see his mother looking steadily at him, and there was always a sadness in her face. He knew that she needed him, for the next oldest of the brothers of those who were at home was only seventeen. But his country had asked him to stand by and would call him if it needed him.

The struggle within him lasted for weeks. Then he asked that they seek no exemption for him.

In his presence his mother never again referred to his going, but he would see her troubled face watching him.

But she talked with the influential men in the valley hoping there would be some suggestion that would honorably relieve Alvin from the duty of going. Pastor Pile had gone ahead to see what he could do, and he learned that those who were "conscientious objectors" would not have to go. The tenets of his church, he held, were against all wars. Alvin was an elder; he had subscribed to and was living the principles of his religion. He hurried home to Mrs. York.

But the soldier, himself, had to make the plea for exemption, no one could make it for him.

Alvin never made it.

In the middle of November his summons reached him. He had but twenty-four hours to respond.

He sent a note to Gracie, telling her his "little blue card" had come and he asked her to meet him at the church—which always stands open by the roadside. As they walked toward her home they arranged to meet the next morning at the rock under the beech trees, when she would leave to carry the cows to the pasture. And it was there she promised to marry him—when he returned from the war.

Men at the store saw Alvin come down from the mountain and he could not escape some banterings over the success or failure of his early morning tryst.

"Jes left it to her," he is said to have frankly confessed, "she can have me for the takin' when I git back."

He and his mother were alone in their home for several hours. When he left he stopped at the Brooks' porch where relatives and neighbors had assembled. As he walked away he turned, unexpectedly, up the path toward the rock on the mountainside. It is now known he went there to kneel alone in prayer.

When he came down to the store, to the men waiting for him, he spoke with an assured faith he had not shown before. "I know, now, that I'll be back," he told them.

His mother, weeping, tho hiding it from him, had slowly followed as far as the Brooks' porch.

Alvin, looking back toward the old Coonrod Pile home, saw her and waved to her, then hurried to the buggy that was to take him to Jamestown.

As the grating of the moving buggy wheels on the road reached the Brooks porch, Mrs. York gave a cry that went to responsive hearts in every home in that part of the valley. And she secluded herself, and sobbed for days.