, 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.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER VIII

A NARROW ESCAPE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

All this time, strangely enough, no hint of Peter Strong's identity had
become known. It was little short of a miracle that it should not have
been discovered. Many circumstances, however, fostered the secret. In
the first place none of the men from the tanneries ever came to the
fashionable west side of the town; there was nothing to call them there.
Had they come the chances were that they would probably at some time
have encountered Peter in company with his father and mother driving,
motoring, or going to church. Several school friends had, it is true,
unearthed the interesting information that Peter was "working," but the
discovery was greeted with but scant curiosity. One's place in life
closes up very quickly after one drops from sight. When the idol of the
Milburn ball team had vanished it had caused great agitation and for a
brief interval he had been sincerely mourned; then some one else had
been raised up to fill the gap, life was readjusted, and soon Peter and
his glorious record were forgotten.

Under other conditions this lack of loyalty on the part of his friends
would have wounded Peter sorely; now, however, the feeling was one of
mortified pride rather than pained regret. His own attitude toward his
former comrades had also in the meantime undergone a change. The boys he
had looked up to, even the wisest of the seniors, seemed to him very
young indeed, and their football worries pitiably unimportant. They were
but preparing for the real work of the world while Peter, and others
like him, were actually doing it. In consequence not a lad among all his
former classmates was half so companionable or congenial as was his new
friend, Nat Jackson.

And so, as the months sped past and Peter's second year in the tannery
neared its end, he found himself not only content with the present life
but more and more absorbed in each fresh experience of leather m