e
script clerk in order to get cash to replace his loss. A buddy in the
mine was selling out his few possessions at a sacrifice because his wife
had run off with a Hunkie. The Hungarian showed the faithless creature a
billfold with greenbacks in it, promised her a silk dress and a
permanent.

"Why don't you buy new furniture at the commissary?" the script clerk
wanted to know of Clate. "There are beds and chairs, bureaus and tables.
Get them on time."

"I can't afford it," Clate said honestly.

So, after much bickering, the company's script clerk offered to give the
miner script for his time.

"My buddy has to have cash money," Clate argued. "He's quitting. Going
back to his folks over in Ohio."

Clate found out that when he sold his time he got only about fifty cents
for a dollar.

"What you think I'm accommodating you for?" the company's script clerk
wanted to know. "I'm not out for my health. Course if you don't want to
take it"--he shoved the money halfway across the counter to Clate--"you
don't have to. There are plenty of fellows who are glad to sell their
time."

There was nothing left for Clate to do. He and his family had to have
the bare necessities, bed, table, chairs.

Soon he was in the category with the other miners, always behind, always
overdrawn, always selling his time before payday. Soon he was getting an
empty envelope with a lot of figures marked on the outside. Clate was
company-owned! If he lived to be a hundred he'd never be paid out.

Though Clate Wellford and the other coal miners never heard the word
redemptioner and indent, they were not unlike those pioneer victims of
unscrupulous subordinates. Men in bondage like the sharecropper of the
Deep South, the Okie of the West.

How different the children of the coal field looked to those along the
creeks in the shady hollows of the Blue Ridge!

In the coal camps they were unkempt and bony, in dirty, ragged garments.
They squabbled among themselves and shambled listlessly along the narrow
path that led past the row of shacks toward the commissary. The path was
black with coal dust and slate dumped along the way to fill the mud
holes.

Why do they continue to live in such squalor and in bondage? Why don't
they move away?

If a miner should decide to move out, he has no means of getting his few
belongings to the railroad spur some distance from the camp, for he has
neither team nor wagon. All these are company-owned. The company, wh