King Coal by Upton Sinclair

Hal Warner started to drag himself down the road, but was unable to make it. He got as far as a brooklet that came down the mountainside, from which he might drink without fear of typhoid; there he lay the whole day, fasting. Towards evening a thunderstorm came up, and he crawled under the shelter of a rock, which was no shelter at all. His single blanket was soon soaked through, and he passed a night almost as miserable as the previous one. He could not sleep, but he could think, and he thought about what had happened to him. "Bill" had said that a coal mine was not a football field, but it seemed to Hal that the net impress of the two was very much the same. He congratulated himself that his profession was not that of a union organiser.

At dawn he dragged himself up, and continued his journey, weak from cold and unaccustomed lack of food. In the course of the day he reached a power-station near the foot of the canyon. He did not have the price of a meal, and was afraid to beg; but in one of the group of buildings by the roadside was a store, and he entered and inquired concerning prunes, which were twenty-five cents a pound. The price was high, but so was the altitude, and as Hal found in the course of time, they explained the one by the other -- not explaining, however, why the altitude of the price was always greater than the altitude of the store. Over the counter he saw a sign: "We buy scrip at ten percent discount. " He had heard rumours of a state law forbidding payment of wages in "scrip"; but he asked no questions, and carried off his very light pound of prunes, and sat down by the roadside and munched them.