The Story of Leather

Peter Coddington is fifteen, the son of the man who runs the Coddington tanneries, and far keener on pitching for the Milburn High freshman nine than on his Latin. He flunks his examinations, loses his place on the team, and learns that his father has arranged something other than a tutor: a laborer’s job on the tannery floor, taken under the borrowed name Peter Strong so the men will not know whose son he is. Bassett runs the year as part factory tour and part moral schooling, following hides from the soaking vats through the beamhouse, the tan liquors, the dyeing and the finishing. A real story moves alongside it. Peter befriends Nat Jackson, who supports his widowed mother on a boy’s wages, and talks a yardful of angry workmen out of a strike.