"We sure did hump ourselves!" Around the camp fire that night Sanderson was moody and taciturn.

He had stretched out on his blanket and lay listening to the men until one by one they dropped off to sleep.
Sanderson's thoughts were bitter.

He felt the constricting influence of his enemies; he was like the herd of cattle that his men had rounded up that day, for little by little Silverthorn, Dale, and Maison were cutting down his area of freedom and of action, were hampering him on all sides, and driving him to a point where he would discover resistance to be practically useless.
He had thought in the beginning that he could devise some way to escape the meshes of the net that was being thrown around him, but he was beginning to realize that he had underestimated the power and the resources of his enemies.
Maison and Silverthorn he knew were mere tentacles of the capital they represented; it was their business to reach out, searching for victims, in order to draw them in and drain from them the last vestige of wealth.
And Sanderson had no doubt that they did that work impersonally and without feeling, not caring, and perhaps not understanding the tortures of a system--of a soulless organization seeking only financial gain.
Dale, however, was intensely human and individualistic.

He was not as subtle nor as smooth as his confederates.

And money was not the only incentive which would drive him to commit crime.