A MAN GETS A SQUARE DEAL Dale did not miss Ben Nyland by more than a few hundred yards as he passed through the neck of the basin.

But the men could not see each other in the black shadows cast by the somber mountains that guarded the entrance to the basin, and so they sped on, one headed away from Okar and one toward it, each man nursing his bitter thoughts; one intent on killing and the other riding to escape the death that, he felt, was imminent.
Dale reached the Bar D and pulled the saddle and bridle from his horse.
He caught up a fresh animal, threw saddle and bridle on him, and then ran into the house to get some things that he thought might be valuable to him.
He came out again, and nervously paused on the threshold of the door to listen.
A sound reached his ears--the heavy drumming of a horse's hoofs on the hard sand in the vicinity of the ranchhouse; and Dale gulped down his fear as he ran to his horse, threw himself into the saddle and raced around a corner of the house.
He had hardly vanished into the gloom of the night when another rider burst into view.
The second rider was Sanderson.

He did not halt Streak at the door of the Bar D ranchhouse, for from a distance he had seen a man throw himself upon a horse and dash away, and he knew of no man in the basin, except Dale, who would find it necessary to run from his home in that fashion.
So he kept Streak in the dead run he had been in when approaching the house, and when he reached the corner around which Dale had vanished, he saw his man, two or three hundred yards ahead, flashing across a level toward the far side of the big basin.
He knew that Dale thought his pursuer was Nyland, and that thought gave Sanderson a grim joy.

In Sanderson's mind was a picture of Dale's face--of the stark, naked astonishment that would be on it when he discovered that it was Sanderson and not Nyland who had caught him.
For Sanderson would catch him--he was convinced of that.
The conviction became strengthened when, after half an hour's run, Streak had pulled up on Dale.

Sanderson could see that Dale's horse was running erratically; that it faltered on the slight rises that they came to now and then.