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, which controls the railroad spur, also has control too over the boxcars that are on the track. Only the company can make requisition for an empty boxcar. If a miner wants to move he cannot even get space, though he is willing to pay for it, in a boxcar to have his goods hauled out. He stays on defeated and discouraged. If, however, he does quit one coal camp and get out he is unskilled in other labor and if he should try to evade his store and other obligations with one coal company, the office employees have a way of passing on the information to another operation. There are ways of putting a laborer on the blacklist. But why should he try to move on? Word comes back to the miner from other buddies who have tried other camps. "They're all the same. Might as well stay where you are." Behind every shack is a dump heap of cans, coal ashes, potato peel, coffee grounds, and old shoes. Rarely was the voice of the miner's wife raised in song as she plodded through her daily drudgery. Now and then the young folks could be heard singing--but not an ancient ballad. Rather it was a rakish song picked up from drummers coming through the mining camps who sold their inferior wares to the commissary manager.