my story and gained admission to his night school;
and for three weeks moved in and out among the socially damned of that
horrible stockade.

In that time I got the facts of the life there and I became so
depressed by what I saw that I had to fight daily to keep off a sense
of hate that pressed in upon me every time I went into that
atmosphere.

Here were eight hundred men, seven hundred of them coloured. They had
committed crimes against persons and property. The state of Alabama
hired them out to the corporation at so much a head and the
corporation proceeded, with state aid, to make their investment pay.

The men were underfed and overworked and in addition were exploited in
the most shameful manner by officials from the top to the bottom.

For the slightest infraction of the rules they were flogged like
galley slaves. Women were flogged as well as men. What the lash and
the labour left undone tuberculosis finished. Unsanitary conditions,
rotten sheds, sent many of them into eternity, where they were better
off.

They were classified according to their ability to dig coal, not
according to the crimes committed.

From the stockade I went to a lumber camp where some officials had
been found guilty of peonage.

[Illustration: Irvine Punching Logs in the Gulf of Mexico, 1907]

I got a job as a teamster and took my place in the camp among the
labourers as if I had spent my life at it.

In this way I got at the facts of how and why men had been decoyed
from New York and imprisoned in the forests.

I was so much at home in my work and so disguised that no one ever for
a moment suspected me. I obtained photographs of the bosses, the
bloodhounds and the camp box cars in which the lumber Jacks lived.

Several times around a bonfire of pine knots I entertained the men of
the camp with stories of travel, history and romance.

If I had been discovered, if the purpose of my presence had been known
I would have been shot like a dog; for life is as cheap in a Southern
lumber field as in any part of the world.

From the lumber camp I went to one of the big turpentine camps where
conditions are as primitive and as inhuman as in the stockades.

My next and last job in the South was punching logs in Pensacola
harbour for a dollar and six "bits" a day. There I got material for
several stories of peons who had escaped from the woods.

While in Pensacola I made a visit, one Sunday morning, to the city
jail and asked per