THE CLIMB UP THE LADDER

F Peter expected to hear more of the mysterious tie that linked his family with that of the Jacksons he was disappointed; for his father did not refer to the story again, and although the boy burned with curiosity to know more he had not the courage to ask. Had not Mr. Coddington gone steadily forward perfecting plans for the seashore outing it would have seemed as if the incident had entirely slipped from his mind. But the personal interest he displayed in arranging every detail of the trip proved beyond question that the memory of the obligation at which he had hinted was still vividly before him. The vacation was arranged without trouble. Mrs. Jackson’s first objections to accepting this favor at the hands of the Coddington Company were quieted when told by the doctors that the plan would be highly beneficial to the health of her boy. Both Peter and Nat were in high spirits. To lads who had been confined within doors all summer the prospect of bathing, sailing, and a month in the open was like water to the thirsty.

Fortunately Dame Nature herself smiled graciously upon the project, for during the next four weeks she coaxed back to earth warm, golden days from the fast fleeing Indian summer. The magic touch of sunshine and fresh air flooded Nat’s cheek with healthy color and as if by miracle, strength returned to the delicate ankle; as for Peter he became swarthy as a young Arab. So delighted was Mrs. Jackson in watching the transformation in her two boys that she was quite unaware that a soft pinkiness was stealing into her own face. A vacation had seemed such an impossible thing that she had never dared picture how welcome such a rest would be. When, weeks later, the trio returned to town and Mr. Coddington surprised them by meeting them at the station with the motor-car his gratification was extreme. He waved aside all thanks, however, and after dropping Nat and his mother at their home he rolled off with Peter, explaining that he would take the lad to his own door. Nat wondered not a little where that door was, and he would have been overwhelmed with amazement had he known that portals no less pretentious than those of the Coddington mansion itself opened to receive his chum. Very wide open indeed were they thrown when the car bringing Peter and his father turned into the long avenue leading to the house. How glad Peter’s mother was to see him, and how satisfied she was with the witchcraft that wind and wave had wrought!

“I guess there is no doubt that now you are fit either for school or for work, Peter,” said Mr. Coddington. “Which is it to be? Are you still firm in your decision to stick to the tannery? It isn’t too late to change your mind, you know, if you wish to do so.” “I’m firmer for the tannery than ever, Father,” answered Peter, smiling.

“Going to fight it out, are you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good!”

It was only one word, but Peter knew that his father was pleased.

Accordingly on the following Monday morning the boy again took up his old work in the finishing department. Here Nat joined him, and since this branch of leather manufacture was an entirely new world to Jackson, Peter took his turn at explaining its various processes, and felt no little pride in having the teaching obligations reversed, and being able to give his chum instructions concerning matters of which he was ignorant. The two boys were becoming quite expert at boarding calfskins and had settled down with great contentment to this task when one day they were surprised and perhaps not a little disappointed to receive orders to leave their present occupation and report for duty at Factory 2, the sheepskin tannery.

“Another beamhouse!” exclaimed Peter in dismay. “I thought we were through with that sort of thing for good and all, Nat.”

“Oh, it isn’t likely we’ll stay there,” was Nat’s hopeful rejoinder. “Evidently somebody higher up wants us to have this chance to see how sheepskins are prepared and I, for one, am not sorry for I’ve no very clear idea.”

“I’m worse off than you, Nat,” chuckled Peter. “I’ve no idea at all.”

“Nonsense, Peter! By this time you must know the general process for preparing skins.”

“Why, yes. I suppose the hair is taken off and the skins tanned just as calfskins are.”

“Yes, the main facts are the same. There are many points, however, where the processes differ because the skins of sheep, kids, goats, and such creatures must undergo entirely different treatment. The kid used for gloves and even for shoes, you see, is far more delicate than is the calfskin that we have been finishing.”

“Yes, of course,” agreed Peter thoughtfully. “Well, I suppose we shall now find out all about it and that it will be interesting; but I do wish, Nat, that we could learn it somewhere except in another beamhouse.”

Peter’s wish, alas, was of no avail and accordingly once more the two boys donned rubber boots and overalls and started again at the foot of the ladder—this time in Factory 2, where the skins of sheep, kids, and goats were tanned. Sheepskins, they soon learned, were received by the tanners in one of two conditions: either the wool was already off and they arrived in casks drenched or pickled, many bales of one dozen each being packed in a cask; or the skins came to the tannery salted, with the wool on and precisely in the condition that they were when taken from the backs of the sheep at the ranches and abattoirs. So long as the hair was on the skins were called “pelts”; but the moment the hair was removed the skins became “slats.” The pickled skins it was simple enough to tan, for they had been carefully prepared for the tanners before being shipped; there were firms, the foreman told Peter, that did just this very thing. If desired the pickled sheepskins could even be worked into a cheap white leather without further tanning. Most of them, however, were tanned.

But the unhairing of the sheep pelts was a different problem. After they had been soaked about twenty-four hours in borax and water to get out the dirt and salt they must first be put through a machine that cleansed the wool and shaved off any fat adhering to the flesh side. Then they were ready to have the wool removed. A very delicate process this was, Peter and Nat soon discovered. Each pelt was spread smoothly on a table wool side down, and a preparation of lime and sulphide of sodium was spread evenly over it with a brush, great care being taken to let none of the liquid used get upon the wool side of the skin. The pelt was then folded and left from eight to ten hours until the solution which had been brushed over it had penetrated it and loosened the hair. The wool could then very easily be pulled off, sorted as the skins were unhaired, and sold to dealers as “pulled wool.”

One fact interested Peter very much, and that was that usually the slats were thinnest where the wool was longest. “I suppose the strength of the sheep all went to its hair,” speculated he to Nat. “Isn’t it funny that it should!”

Another thing the boys learned about sheepskins which was very different from the treatment of calfskins was that before the slats could be tanned they had to be put through a powerful press and have the grease squeezed out of them.

“The skin of a sheep has a vast amount of oil in it,” explained one of the workmen, “and it is impossible to do anything until this grease has been extracted; so we put a bunch of skins under a heavy press and then collect the grease that runs out, refine, and sell it.”

Peter and Nat watched this pressing with great interest.

When the skins came out of the press they were so hard and stiff that it was necessary to put them into the revolving drums that separated and softened them. This was called “wheeling up the slats.” The odor in the press room was far worse than anything that Peter had yet encountered—much more disagreeable than was an ordinary beamhouse. Both he and Nat were only too glad when noon time came and they could get out into the air.

“Whew!” cried Peter, throwing himself down in the sunshine, “I hope they don’t put us in that press room to work, Nat.”

“It’s fierce, isn’t it?” Nat answered. “The men must hate it.”

“I suppose they get accustomed to it just as I got used to the beamhouse,” Peter said. “Why, when I began work in the beamhouse of Factory 1 I thought I never could endure it. Do you remember how you tried to cheer me up that first day?”

Nat laughed at the memory.

“Indeed I do. You looked perfectly hopeless, Peter.”

“That’s about the way I felt,” smiled Peter, “and I believe I’d feel so again if I thought I had weeks of that press room smell before me.”

But Peter need not have feared any such calamity, for after lunch he and Nat were given a lesson in tanning sheepskins and were told they were to work at that task until further notice.

The process, they discovered, differed very radically from the calfskin treatment with which they were so familiar. Many of the slats were tanned by being laid in trays of fine, moist powder that looked like brown sugar.

“What is this stuff?” inquired Peter of a man who stood near by.

“That is sumac, young man.”

“Sumac! Just common sumac?”

“Well, no. It is the same sort of thing, though. We import this from Sicily, because the foreign leaves grow larger and contain more tannin. Sicilian sumac makes better leather than does the American variety, which comes chiefly from Virginia.”

Peter nodded.

“And how long, pray, do the skins lie covered up in this snuffy brown powder?” questioned Nat.

“About a week,” answered the man. “We do not tan all sheepskins this way, however. Some, as you will see, are tanned by being suspended from a bar into a vat of quebracho. Others are put into wheels of chrome tan just as calfskins are. White leathers are tanned, or more properly speaking tawed, in a mixture of alum and egg-yolk.”

“Egg-yolk!” gasped Peter. “Eggs—such as we eat?”

“I am not so sure that they are such as you would care to eat,” grinned the man, “but the yolks come from eggs, nevertheless.”

“I should think it would take lots of men to break the eggs fast enough and get them ready,” murmured Peter, half aloud.

“Bless your heart! We don’t break the eggs here!” roared the workman, shaking with laughter. “No, indeed. We get egg-yolk by the barrel; when we pour it out it looks like thin yellow paint. We tan kid for gloves in egg-yolk,” he went on, observing that both Nat and Peter were much interested. “After sheepskins are tanned the leather must all be fat-liquored, dried by steam or air fans, dampened, split or shaved off to uniform thickness, dyed in revolving paddle-wheels filled with color, and tacked on boards to dry just as calfskins are. The chemists who have laboratories up-stairs test the dyes and mix or match the colors for us. Then the skins go to the various rooms for the different finishes. And speaking of finishes, I suppose you went into the buffing-room in the other factory.”

“No,” said Peter, “we didn’t—at least I didn’t.”

“Nor I,” put in Nat. “The door was always closed and no one was admitted.”

“They don’t like to have people go in if they can help it because every time the door is opened it stirs things up; but I can take you into our buffing-room if you want to go.”

“I wish you would,” cried Peter.

Accordingly all went up-stairs and their guide cautiously pushed open a door on which No Admittance was scrawled in large letters. The moment Peter squeezed through it he drew in his breath and then regretted that he had done so, for he at once began to cough.

The boys glanced about the room before them.

Every window was closed, making the air hot and stuffy; yet, Peter asked himself, how was such a condition to be avoided in a place where it was evident that even the tiniest draught must create instant havoc? This room which Peter and Nat surveyed was thick with flying white particles that were being whirled into space from rapidly turning emery wheels. The workmen who were busy buffing the flesh side of split skins in order to get the rough surface required for a suede finish seemed enveloped in a miniature blizzard. As the swiftly turning discs sent clouds of white dust into the air it settled on the hair, faces, eyelashes, and clothing until the laborers looked like snow men moving amid the blinding flakes of an old-fashioned storm. Peter and Nat, who looked on, began to be changed into snow men, too.

“I guess you don’t want to stay in here long,” announced their guide, raising his voice to be heard above the noise of the revolving wheels. “As you see, they are making ‘suede,’ or ooze finished leather. Some calfskins are finished this way too, as of course you know. A certain amount of this leather will be left white for gloves or shoes; more of it, however, will be stretched on boards and brushed over with some colored dye. Suede is made in all sorts of fancy shades for women’s party slippers.”

Peter nodded and then, quite without warning, he sneezed.

Immediately a cloud of whiteness shot into the air.

“Hurry! Let’s get out!” cried Nat. “I’m going to sneeze, too.”

The man who was conducting them opened the door a crack and they all three slipped through. Safe in the outer room they stopped and laughingly surveyed one another. All were as white as if sprinkled with powder.

“Goodness!” Peter exclaimed, rubbing his eyelashes. “How can those men breathe? I should think that in a day they would swallow enough dust to fill their lungs up solid.”

“They don’t mind it.”

“Well, I only hope we shan’t be put in there to work.”

“So do I!” was Nat’s fervent rejoinder.

Fortunately for the boys they escaped doing duty in the buffing-room. Instead they worked throughout the year in the beamhouse and the different finishing departments of Factory 2. Although this factory was known as the sheepskin tannery they soon found that the skins of lambs, kids, and goats were also tanned and finished there. The skins of the young kids or goats were much too delicate for shoes and were made into thin flexible leather for kid gloves; the leather commonly known as kid and used for shoes was not really kid at all, the boys were told, but the skin of mature goats. Inquiry also brought forth the surprising information that there were between sixty and seventy different kinds of goatskin, the thickness and grain of the material depending on the climate and the conditions under which the animals had been raised. Some of these skins were imported from Brazil, some from Buenos Ayres, Mexico, France, Russia, India, China, Tripoli, or Arabia.

Goat breeders, the foreman said, killed their flocks at the season of the year when the men who collected skins made their rounds. These collectors went from one station to another and the goat herders, carrying bundles of skins on their backs, went down to the station nearest the hill country in which they were grazing their flocks and sold their stock to the collector, who promptly paid them in cash. When the collector had bought all the skins he wished he had them baled and sent them across country to the nearest seaport from which they were shipped to America. Many of the skins coming from India and Russia were sent first to London and then reshipped to the United States.

All goatskins, of no matter what variety, were tanned by the chrome process, and because they were smaller and of lighter weight than hides, tanned much more quickly. They were finished in many different ways: glazed kid, which was made in colors as well as black, had a shiny surface made by “striking” or burnishing the leather on the grain side; mat kid, soft and dull, was treated with oil and wax; suede kid was made in fancy colors for party shoes. These were some of the most important varieties. Then there was buckskin, the skin of the reindeer, most frequently buffed and finished in colors for gloves, or in white for shoes. Kangaroo was also classed under the head of kid.

“Is patent kid finished in this factory?” inquired Peter one day.

“No. All the patent leathers—both patent kid and patent calf—have a factory all to themselves.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“Oh, you will some day, no doubt. I hear they need a new boss over there. The men hate Tolman. Who knows but you may get his job!”

Peter laughed, and so did the other men who chanced to be standing about.

“I guess there is no danger that Tolman will lose his place on my account,” replied the boy with no little amusement.

Many months later when Peter met Tolman he recalled this incident and understood more fully why the men disliked him and felt that the patent leather factory needed a new head.