A NEW FRIEND

OR a week Peter worked patiently cutting ropes from freshly received shipments of skins, trimming the skins, and learning to sort them. Every night he went home exhausted after his day’s work. Sometimes it was hard to realize that he was the same boy who, but a short time before, had jauntily sauntered out to play tennis every evening with his classmates. He couldn’t have played tennis now had he tried, and he was not sorry when the rumor reached him that it was commonly reported at the high school that he had been sent away to a distant military academy. So that was the reason why the fellows had not hunted him up! Perhaps it was just as well. It saved many embarrassing questions, and he was much too worn out when night came to do anything but fall into his bed. Still he did not complain of his fatigue. He was too proud to do that. Moreover had he not brought the entire situation upon himself? He would swallow his medicine in silence.

But he knew from his mother’s troubled questions; from her unusual care that his luncheon be tempting and nourishing; from the solicitous gaze she fixed on him that the present ordeal worried her not a little. Once he overheard her say to his father: “The boy isn’t strong enough to stand it! He will be ill.”

“Don’t have any anxiety about Peter,” was the retort. “The young scoundrel finds energy enough, I hear, to play ball with the men every noon time. He is the star pitcher of Factory 1.” A chuckle came from the older man. “It is something of a joke, too,” he continued, “for I thought I had put him beyond all possible range of a bat and ball. Don’t fret any more about him. Let him alone. He is showing more pluck than I dreamed he possessed.”

“But suppose he should overdo.”

“He won’t overdo.”

And the prediction was true. Tired as he was every night Peter awoke in the morning entirely refreshed. The lameness of back and muscles soon wore away. At the end of the week, when he received his first pay envelope, no boy in the wide world ever felt as rich as he. Six dollars! Six dollars of his very own! To be sure his father had often given him twice that amount; but receiving it as a present was a vastly different matter from earning it.

“I mean to save up for a motorcycle,” Peter declared. “Then I could ride to the tannery every day.”

“So you could,” agreed Mr. Coddington. “It is not a bad idea. Don’t forget, though, that you will be needing clothes now and then. You spoke last night of wanting some flannel shirts to wear to work.”

“Yes, but you——” Mr. Coddington shook his head.

“I have bought your clothes up to this time,” he answered, “but now that you have a salary of your own it is time you relieved me of that expense.”

“Oh—of—of—course,” Peter stammered. “I guess, though, I can get the motorcycle and pay for my clothes, too, without any trouble. How much do clothes cost?”

“Let me see!” Mr. Coddington took out a small expense book and turned its pages rapidly. “Clothing for Peter. Here it is. Last year I spent for you $638.”

“For me! For my clothes?” gasped the boy. “Did I spend $638? Why, I had no idea of it! I could have gone without some of those overcoats and things as well as not if I had known they cost so much. That’s an awful lot for a boy to spend, isn’t it?”

“It’s a plenty.”

“Why, it’s more than I will earn in a whole year.”

“Yes, I am afraid it is—at least, for the present.” Peter was thoughtful.

“I can see that it’s good-bye to the motorcycle,” he said at last, disappointment in every feature.

With an impulsive gesture Mr. Coddington thrust his hand into the breast pocket where his check-book lay; then resolutely took out the hand and put it behind him.

“There seems to be no way but for you to do without a motorcycle for a while, son,” he replied. “Do not be discouraged, though. You are now pretty well stocked with the necessary clothing and in consequence will not require many new things for some time. If you are not too proud to wear your old suits to work you can easily put aside some money each week.”

“I do not care how old and shabby my clothes are,” smiled Peter. “It does not make much difference what I wear to the tannery if I can just have some flannel shirts, overalls, and rubber boots. I’ve packed away my white tennis suits in moth-balls, you know, since I went into the mill.”

They both laughed.

As flannel shirts and overalls were inexpensive and easily obtained, and as Peter already had rubber boots it was possible to begin the saving for the motorcycle without further delay.

In the meantime orders came that Strong was to leave his task of trimming skins and present himself at the beamhouse. Reluctantly he bade farewell to Carmachel and the other men—his first friends at the tannery—and on the following Monday morning he made his way into the long, low room where he had been told the skins were tanned. The room was a revelation, and a none too pleasant one at that! If he had thought the unloading and sorting department unsavory what should he say of this? The floor of the beamhouse was slippery with water, lime, and tanning solutions; unpleasant fumes of wet skins made heavy the air; revolving paddle-wheels suspended from the ceiling dripped upon the passer-by; and men, dragging saturated skins from vats in the floor, piled them in heaps where the water oozing from them trickled out into the general sloppiness and transformed the floor into a great shallow pool of moisture. Back and forth through this wetness moved workmen who, as they wheeled barrows of freshly tanned skins, left a wake of slime behind them. Peter looked about in consternation. The steaming odor of the room was nauseating and filled him with disgust. Could he stand it? And they called this a promotion! What wonder that Carmachel had chuckled when asked what the beamhouse was!

As Peter stood hesitating, a prey to these confused impressions, a lad about his own age touched him on the shoulder.

“Bryant, the foreman, wants to speak to you,” he said.

Peter roused himself and followed the boy.

In a corner of the room the foreman greeted him.

“How are you, Strong?” he began. “You see you are no stranger to me, for I have watched you play ball at noon time. I am glad we are to have you in our department.”

“Thank you, sir. Yes, Mr. Tyler said I was to report here for the present.”

“That’s good. We can put you to work, all right. Before you begin, however, I should like to have you look about and get an idea what we do in here. A man always enjoys his work better and does it more intelligently, I contend, if he has some notion of the process in which he is to have a share. Jackson is about your age and has been in this room a long time.” (He indicated the boy at Peter’s elbow.) “Suppose he takes you around and shows you what happens to the skins after they are sent in here to us.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Jackson seemed pleased at the task assigned him.

“I’m glad you are coming into the beamhouse to work, Strong,” he ventured timidly. “There are not many boys here my age. You won’t like it at first, I’m afraid, but you will soon get used to it.”

“I don’t believe I shall like it at all,” was Peter’s rueful reply. “It’s an awful place, isn’t it?”

“Oh, it’s not so bad as it seems. You won’t mind it—really you won’t. Of course the smell is disagreeable and it is wet and sloppy, too; but Bryant, the foreman, is a mighty white fellow and the men, although mostly foreigners, are pleasant enough. I myself was so thankful to get any work that I did not much care what it was.”

“Have you been here long?” questioned Peter.

“Ever since I was old enough to go to work—a year this August.”

“And you’ve been in this room all that time!”

“Yes. It takes quite a while to get a promotion here at the tannery. My pay has been raised to nine dollars, though. Maybe I wasn’t glad to get the money! You see, I support my mother.” Jackson threw back his head proudly.

“You? You support yourself and your mother?” repeated Peter incredulously.

“Sure I do! Why not?”

“But you—why, you are not much older than I am!”

“I’m sixteen. Mother and I get on very well on what I earn, even though it isn’t much. Don’t you have anybody to take care of?”

“No.” Jackson regarded Peter with astonishment.

“I should think you would be rich as a lord if you have all your money to yourself!” he exclaimed. “What on earth do you find to do with it?”

Once—and the time was not far passed, either—Peter would have laughed at the naive question; now he answered gravely:

“Oh, I am saving some of it.”

“That’s right. I can’t save a cent at present, but some time I hope to get a better salary and then I shall be able to. Now let’s go over to the other end of the room and see where they are putting the skins to soak in those big vats of water to get out the salt and dirt. That’s the first thing they do after the skins are sent into the beamhouse. You remember how stiff and hard the dry skins were when you unloaded them. Well, they are put into the great revolving wooden drums that you see overhead and are worked about in borax and water until they become soft. They are washed, too. Then after all the skins have been washed and softened they are thrown into lime and are left there until the fibre swells and the hair is loosened. The men you see with rubber gloves on are the limers. If they did not wear gloves they would get their hands burned and raw, for the lime and the chemicals used in the tan often make the hands and arms very sore.”

“But I don’t see that the skins that are tossed into the lime pits come out with the hair off,” objected Peter.

“Bless your heart—the lime does not take the hair off. The men who unhair them have to do that. They lay the wet skins out on boards and with sharp knives pull and scrape off all the white hair.”

“Why don’t they take off the brown or black hair as well?”

“Because only the white hair is removed by hand. That is kept separate and after being dried is sold to dealers for a good price. The colored hair is taken off by machinery and is sold too, but it is not so valuable.”

“I suppose plasterers can use hair like that,” speculated Peter. “Yes, and upholsterers,” added Jackson.

Peter smiled.

“Carmachel told me nothing in a tannery was wasted,” he said. “I was surprised to find that even the lumps of fat and bits of flesh adhering to the skins, together with the parings that came off when the calfskins were trimmed down to an even thickness, were disposed of for glue stock or fertilizer.”

“Every scrap of stuff is used, I can tell you!” assented Jackson. “Calfskin, you know, is never split; it is not heavy enough for that. Besides it is more nearly uniform in weight than a skin like a bull’s hide, for instance, which is very much heavier about the head. No, calfskin is fairly even and therefore, while wet, is just put between rollers where a thin, sharp blade shaves from the flesh side any part of it that is thicker than any other. It comes out of equal thickness all over. Do you understand?”

Peter nodded.

“And now have you this beamhouse process straight in your head so we can go on?” Jackson held up his hand and began to check off the successive steps on his fingers:

“The skins are washed until the dirt and salt are out; they are worked in paddle-wheels, if necessary, until soft; they are limed; unhaired; and bated, or puered. By puering I mean that they are put through a liquid that takes out all the lime; if the lime is not carefully soaked out the skins will be burned and hard and cannot be tanned properly. After the puering the short-hairers remove any remaining hairs; the skins are thoroughly washed again, and at last are ready for tanning.”

“How are they tanned?”

“Why, by putting them into paddle-wheels filled with the tanning solution where they revolve as many as seven or eight hours. This solution is then changed for a weaker one, and they revolve again for a couple of hours more. Some skins are tanned in a mixture of chemicals which we buy all prepared; we call those chrome tanned. Others are soaked in a vegetable tan of hemlock, oak, chestnut, palmetto roots, gambier, or quebracho.” “Or what?”

“Quebracho!” Jackson rolled out the long word with a gusto. “Quebracho is a tree something like the lignum-vitÆ and grows in South America. The hardened gum comes in barrels and looks like rosin; sometimes, instead of being hard, it is shipped in a liquid state in big tank cars. There is about fifteen per cent. of tannin in quebracho and at the tanneries it can be diluted, of course, to any strength desired. We use it altogether here instead of using other vegetable tans.”

“But it says in my geography that every one uses oak or hemlock bark,” objected Peter, sceptically.

“Well, the Coddington Company doesn’t. Bryant says we tan so much leather here that there would be no way of disposing of the quantities of bark left after the tannin had been extracted from it. Besides bark is scarce and expensive; then, too, it takes a car-load of bark to get even a decent amount of tannin and the freighting adds to the cost. Quebracho can be shipped by water and is therefore more economical, and for the varieties of leather we tan here it answers the purpose as well. It is lots of work to get the tannin out of oak or hemlock bark. The bark has to be ground up and put in a leaching-kettle full of water; after it has boiled the liquid is drained off and the tannin extracted. Using quebracho is a much simpler method. Of course we use oak and hemlock bark, though, in the sole leather tanneries over at Elmwood.”

Peter regarded Jackson intently.

“How did you come to know so much about all this business?” he asked at last.

“Oh, I don’t know much,” was the modest answer. “I just wanted to learn what I could while I had the chance. You can’t help being curious when you work so long in one room. Bryant saw I was interested and he’s explained all the things I wanted to find out.”

“Then maybe you’ll pass on some more of your information,” laughed Peter, “and tell me why some of the skins are tanned in quebracho and some in chrome.” “As I told you,” repeated Jackson good-naturedly, “quebracho is a vegetable tan and chrome a chemical tan. The effect of each of these processes on the skins is different; so the process used depends on what sort of leather is wanted. At many tanneries chrome is used almost entirely for tanning calfskins because the process is so much quicker; chrome takes but about nine hours while quebracho tanning takes two weeks or thereabouts.”

“I see. And after the tanning?”

“The skins are inspected while wet and sorted for stock; they are then stamped with a letter or number so they can be identified; they are fat-liquored, and are dyed.”

“What is fat-liquored?”

“Fat-liquored means working the skins about in a mixture of soap and oil until they absorb these softening ingredients and become pliable. All leather, whether chrome or vegetable tanned, has to go through this process. The liquid is put into paddle-wheels just as the tanning mixture is. The dyeing is done in paddle-wheels too, and some kinds of leather have in addition a coat of dye rubbed into them by hand. It gives them a better surface.”

“What is your work, Jackson?” asked Peter.

“Oh, I’ve done about everything there is to do in a beamhouse. Just now I am inspecting and sorting the skins after they are tanned.”

“What is Mr. Bryant going to set me at?”

“I don’t know. You will have to ask him. But no matter what he gives you to do you must not be discouraged, Strong. You were lucky to get any job at all in the tannery. They have turned away lots of boys your age—they do it every day.”

Peter bit his lip to keep from smiling.

“I suppose I ought to consider myself lucky,” replied he.

“Well, aren’t you? To be young, and well, and to know that if you do your best you have a chance to work up to something better? I think it’s great! I intend to work up. Some day I may be a partner in Coddingtons’—who knows! Then I’ll dress my mother in silk every day in the week and I’ll buy an automobile. I’d like to ride in one of those things just once. Did you ever?”

“Yes,” admitted Peter cautiously.

“Honest? Wasn’t it bully? Where did you go?”

But Peter was spared the difficult task of replying. Instead, Bryant summoned him, and he was given a wheel-barrow filled with wet skins which were to be carried from the soaking vats to the lime pits. All the rest of the morning back and forth he trudged wheeling load after load. It was stupid, dirty work, and he was glad when the noon whistle blew.

“Let’s eat our luncheon together, Strong,” said Jackson, “that is—unless you have somebody else you want to lunch with.”

Peter assented only too gladly. It was far pleasanter to have a boy his own age to speak to than to eat by himself. Besides he liked Jackson.

But even in the fresh breeze that swept the open field, even while playing ball, even at home after a hot bath and clean clothing, Peter could still scent the odor of the beamhouse. It was days before he became accustomed to it and could feel, with Nat Jackson, that he was a lucky boy to have a “job.”