wn on their own who sought employment
at public works, mines, lumber camps, steel mills. They decried any
employment away from the hillside farm, because it meant to them being
an underling. No mountaineer ever wanted to be company-owned. Leastwise
none of the Wellfords of Laurel Creek. But Clate, youngest of Mark
Wellford's family, lured by the promise of big cash money, decided to
quit the farm and take his wife and little family down to the foothills.
"There's a good mine there, pays good money, and there's a good mine
boss on the job," so Clate was told. Some two years later Clate, a weary
figure, emerged one evening from the company commissary. His face was
smudged with coal dust. A miner's lamp still flickered on his grimy cap.
He carried a dinner bucket and the baby on one arm. Over his shoulder
hung a gunnysack that bulged with canned goods and a poke of meal. At
his heels followed his bedraggled, snaggle-toothed wife, a babe in her
arms and another tugging at her skirts. Her faded calico dress that
dragged in the back was tied in at the waist with a ragged apron. There
was a look of sad resignation in her eyes. Now and then she brushed a
hand up the back of her head to catch the drab stray locks. She might
have been fifty, judging from the stooped shoulders and weary step. Yet
the rounded arms--her sleeves were rolled to the elbow--looked youthful.

Clate halted a few minutes to talk to another miner, a boy in his teens.
"What'd you load today?" the younger asked after casual greetings.
"'Tarnal buggy busted a dozen times, held me back," Clate complained,
shifting the dinner pail and the baby. "Always something to hold a man
back." "I'm figuring on going to Georgia," the young lad sounded
hopeful. "Got a buddy down there in the steel mill. Beats the mines any
day." He saw some young friends across the street and hurried to join
them.

"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