2

2.

job 'shooting'. That means drilling holes in the coal and then using powder
to shoot it loose so it won't be so hard to dig. It was a right responsible
place for a strip of a boy; you've got to understand this 'shooting' business,
else you might have a terrible accident.
"I tried to do everything just like they told me, working as hard as I
could. You know, that's the way to get ahead at anything. It wasn't long be-
fore they raised my wages a little, and then in 1903 they made me a foreman and
began paying me a straight salary of $75 a month.
"I did pretty well with that much money, but living was costing me more.
You see, I had married several years before, and my wife and me had five chil-
dren to bring up. That's a job, but I'll tell you how we did it; we only paid
five dollars a month for house rent, and we saved on groceries. You see, all
the salaried men at the mine got their groceries at cost, plus ten percent."
He shook his head slowly, his eyes intent upon the task of removing the
clay from his boots. His face was serious when he spoke again.
"I guess I used what you might call business sense in those days. I
never did like the thing I did, but I wanted to give me family a good raising;
I always put my family in front of everything.
"You see, lots of miners just can't make one payday stretch to the next.
It's 'come day, go day' with lots of them. And back in those days it was worse
than it is now, for the companies just paid off once a month, and the wages
were pretty bad. Then, again, some of the wages were kept in the office, so
sometimes it would be as much as two months before a man could draw his first
pay.

"The company had worked out a plan where a man could cash in his salary
at eighty cents on the dollar. That is, they would advance him eighty cents

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