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 sentment, humor gleaming in his pale eyes. "That feller renigged on me, boss-man; he picked 'em out here and there down the line, thinkin' I didn't have the money to stand it all, I guess. But he started at the top, anyhow. The first thing he fetched me was a horse de over."

"A horse which?" Sid inquired, leaning forward curiously.

"De over." Wallace glanced around in well-simulated manner of surprise. "Mean to tell me none of you fellers ever et a horse de over?"

"I bit a mule's neck one time, though," Joe Lobdell said.

"They start off with 'em in them copper-bottomed caffs," Wallace explained.

"They can keep goin' on with 'em," Pete Benson said, with comfortable superiority.

"What's it made out of?" the boss inquired.

"I'm here to tell you!" Wallace replied fervently. "A horse de over is a plain sardine."

"Sardine?" said everybody, genuine in their surprise that such a familiar article of diet should figure on a fancy bill of fare.

"One sardine," Wallace solemnly averred, "laid out in the middle of a deesh with a olive at his head and a reddish at his tail, and little pieces of pickle all around him. That's a horse de over, men, if anybody asks you."

Wallace politely restrained himself at the climax of his revelation, joining in the big laugh after it was well under way. The boss was so diverted by the explanation of this dish that he took off his hat to give his head air, looking around with the blue pass for five men between his fingers, his big ears red in the heat of his mirth.