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.

VI
Sergeant York's Own Story

When Alvin went to war he carried with him a small, red, cloth-covered
memorandum book, which was to be his diary. He knew that beyond the
mountains that encircled his home there was a world that would be new to
him. He kept the little volume--now with broken-back and
worn--constantly with him, and he wrote in it while in camp, on
shipboard and in the trenches in France. It was in his pocket while he
fought the German machine gun battalion in the Forest of Argonne.

The book with its records was intended for no eyes but his own. Yet
painstaking, using ink, he had headed the volume: "A History of places
where I have been."

As a whole, the volume woul