After visiting the mule boy in Rat Hollow on Sunday, I returned to the camp.  The men were lounging around the stove, smoking, and exchanging experiences.  In one corner, a German sailor was playing his wheezy accordion, and in another, to a group of Slavs, a Russian soldier was singing a love song.  It was my last day with the muckers.  Many of my gang had already gone—­the rest would follow.  It wasn’t a matter of wages or hours—­it was a question of muck.  Once in it, men lived, moved, and had their being in it, but even the most brutalized quailed at the junk pile in the corner of the shed.

The sun was setting behind the red hills.  Save for a long, yellow streak just above the horizon, the sky was a mass of purple billows.  The yellow changed to amber and later to a blood red.  Then rays of sun-fire shot up and splashed the purple billows; the purple and gold later gave place to black clouds through which the stars came one by one, while the muckers were settling down for the night.

It seemed at first as if I would have to commit some crime to get admission to the stockade where the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company had their largest convict labour force.  I was seedy-looking—­my beard had grown and I was still in blue shirt and overalls.  I approached the chaplain—­told him 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.