unpainted,
though here and there a board showed traces of once having been red or
brown. Between the houses at rare intervals a fence post remained. But
the pickets had long since been torn away to fire the cookstove or
grate. There were no gardens. Coal companies did not encourage
gardening. Miners and their families lived out of cans, and canned goods
come high at the company's commissary.

A tipple near the drift mouth of the mine belched coal and coal dust day
after day. When Phoebe--you'd never have known her for the pretty girl
she used to be far back in the Blue Ridge--rubbed out a washing on the
washboard, hung it to dry on the wire line stretched from the back door
to a nail on the side of the out-building, she knew that every rag she
rubbed and boiled and blued would be grimy with coal dust before it
dried. What was she to do about it? Where else could the wash be hung?
Once Phoebe thought she had found the right place. A grassy plot quite
hidden beyond a clump of trees. She put the wet garments in a basket and
carried them off to dry, spreading them upon the green earth. But no
sooner had she spread out the last piece than a fellow came riding up.
"What's the big idea?" he demanded, shaking a fist at the garments on
the ground. And Phoebe, from Shoal's Fork of Greasy Creek, never having
heard the expression, mumbled in confusion, "I'm pleased to meet you."

"Don't try to get fresh," the fellow scowled. "Don't you know this
ground is company-owned? The big boss keeps this plot for his saddle
horse to graze on. Pick up your rags and beat it!"

She understood from the gesture the meaning of beat it and obeyed in
haste.

There was little room to stretch up a line indoors, though she did
sometimes in the winter when the backyard was too sloppy to walk in.
Clate Wellford's was one of the smaller shacks, a room with a lean-to
kitchen. The others, with two rooms, cost more. Besides there were other
things to be taken out of date's pay envelope before it reached him;
there were electric light, coal, the store bill, and the company doctor.

"None of my folks have been sick. We've never even set eyes on the
doctor," Clate complained to the script clerk on the first payday.

"What of it?" the script clerk replied. "You'd be running quick enough
for the doctor if one of your kids or your old woman got sick or met
with an accident, wouldn't you? The doctor's got to live same as the
rest of us."

So the miner stumbl