Sergeant York and His People | Page 9

which is also the store of "Paster" Pile--a frame building upon stilts to allow an unobstructed flow of the Wolf when on a winter rampage--the road turns at right angles to the west. Through fields of corn it goes, across a stretch of red clover to the clump of forest trees which is the schoolhouse grounds and in which nestles the little church that has played such a prominent part in the life of the village. Then the road goes beside the graveyard and again through corn to the general store of John Marion Rains, which with five houses in sight--and one of these the York home--marks the western confine of Pall Mall.
One can be in the center of Pall Mall and not know it, for the residents live in farm houses that dot the valley and in cabins on the mountainsides. The little church, which sits by the road with no homes near it, is the geographical as well as the religious center of the community--it is the heart of Pall Mall.
Passing the Rains store the roadway tumbles down to the York's big spring. A brook in volume the stream flows clear and cool from a low rock-ribbed cave in the base of the mountain.
Across the spring branch, up the mountainside in a clump of honey-suckle and roses and apple trees is the home to which Sergeant York returned.
It is a two-room cabin. The boxing is of rough boards as are the unplaned narrow strips of batting covering the cracks. There is a chimney at one end and in one room is a fireplace. The kitchen is a "lean-to" and the only porch is on the rear, the width of the kitchen-dining room. The porch is for service and work, railed partly with a board for a shelf, which holds the water-bucket, the tin wash basin and burdens brought in from the farm.
Parts of the walls of the two rooms are papered with newspapers and catalog pages; the rough rafters run above. The uncovered floor is of wide boards, worn smooth in service, chinked to keep out the blasts of winter.
The porch in the rear is on a level with the mountainside. To care for the mountain's slope a front stoop was built. The sides of it are scantlings and the steps are narrow boards.
The house has been painted by Poverty; but the home is warmed and lit by a mountain mother's love. The front stoop is a wooden ladder with flat steps but the entrance to the home is an arbor of honey suckle and roses.
On summer nights the York boys sat on that stoop and sang, and their voices floated on the moonbeams out over the valley. The little mother "pottered" about, with ever a smile on her face for her boys. They were happy.
It was from this home that Alvin went to war, and it was to it he returned.
Visitors know, and it is well for others to realize, that Pall Mall and the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" are back among the rising ranges of the Cumberland Mountains forty-eight miles from the railroad.
Alvin York came from a line of ancestors who were cane-cutters and Indian fighters. The earliest ancestor of whom he has knowledge was a "Long Hunter," who with a rifle upon his shoulder strode into the Valley of the Wolf and homesteaded the river bottom-lands. Here his people lived far from the traveled paths. Marooned in their mountain fastnesses, they clung to the customs and the traditions of the past. Their life was simple, and their sports quaint. They held shooting-matches on the mountainside, enjoyed "log-rollings" and "corn-huskings." Strong in their loves and in their hates, they feared God, but feared no man. The Civil War swept over the valley and left splotches of blood.
Friends of Sergeant York, knowing that the history of his people was rich in story, and that the public was waiting, wanting to know more of the man the German army could not run, nor make surrender--and instead had to come to him--urged that his story be told.
He had been mustered out of the army and come back to the valley wanting to pick up again the dropped thread of his former life. He was striving earnestly and prayerfully to blot from recurrent memory that October morning scene on "York's Hill" in France.
His friends and neighbors at Pall Mall waited eagerly for his return. They wanted to hear from his own lips the story of his fight.
No man of the mountains was ever given the home-coming that was his. It was made the reunion of the people, with the neighbors the component parts of one great family.
When home again, Alvin wanted no especial deference shown him. He wished to be again just one of them, to