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.