"Come on, Phoebe!" Clate called over his shoulder to his wife, "get a mosey on you. I'm hongry. And 'ginst you throw a snack of grub together it'll be bedtime. An' before you know it, it's time to get up and hit for the hill again." He plodded on up the winding path to a row of shacks. His little family followed. The row of dilapidated shacks where the miners lived was clinging to the mountain side at the rear, while the fronts were propped up with rough posts. They were all alike with patched rubberoid roofs, broken tile chimneys, windows with broken panes. Rough plank houses 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.