t only seventy-five acres, and far from the best of it, to
Mary York, the truly wonderful little mountain mother who gave to Alvin
York those qualities of mind and heart which stood him in good stead in
the Forest of Argonne, who taught him to so live that he feared no man,
and to do thoroughly and always in the right way that which he had to
do. "Else," as she so frequently said to him, "you'll have to 'do hit
over, or hit'll cause you trouble."

III
The People of the Mountains

The log cabin of the pioneer influenced architecture and gave to us the
house of Colonial design, the first distinctively American type, for the
Colonial home grew around the pioneer's two rooms of logs separated by
an open passageway.

The muzzle-loading rifle--and it was the pioneer's gun--with its long
barrel and its fine sights, gave confidence to the American soldier who
carried it, for he trusted the weapon in his hands.

Progressive inventions finally displaced this rifle in military use, but
for the accuracy of the shot it has never been surpassed, and it is
to-day a loved relic and a valued hunting-piece. Men trained to shoot
with it, used to the slender line of its silver foresight and to the
delicate response of its hair-trigger, have made rare records in
marksmanship. The very difficulty of loading--the time it took--taught
its users to be accurate and not spend the shot.

This rifle stopped the British at Bunker Hill and Kings Mountain, and
over its long barrel Alvin York and some of the best shots of the
American army learned to bring their sights upward to the mark and tip
the hair-trigger when the bead first reached its object.

It was training acquired in the forest, the same manner of marksmanship,
the same self-reliance and individual resourcefulness as a soldier that
gave to Sergeant York the power to come back over the hill in Argonne
Forest, bringing one hundred and thirty-two prisoners, and to the army
under Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, more than a hundred years before,
the fighting resource to achieve victory with a loss of eight killed and
thirteen wounded, while England's records show that "about three
thousand of the British were struck with rifle bullets."

[Footnote: From "The True Andrew Jackson," by Cyrus Townsend Brady,
Chap. IV, p. 88; published by J. B. Lippincott Co., 1906. ]

The man trained behind the muzzle-loading rifle in all the wars America
has fought has been individually a fighter a