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.