All of us who enjoy reading Westerns, or who long ago watched Saturday afternoon movies when we were children, recall that cattle rustlers were considered to be among the lowest kind of criminals in our once Wild West.
When a sheriff's posse caught rustlers tampering with cattle brands and stealing a rancher's cows, the standard punishment was to hang the low-life thieves on the nearest available tree.
Well, cattle rustling unfortunately is still going on in the modern, though admittedly somewhat less wild, West.
A recent news story from Lubbock, Texas, told about a man who was accused of stealing 400 head of cattle, worth more than $200,000.
So far as we know, he got a fair trial. Then it didn't take long -- just 30 minutes, in fact -- for the jury to arrive at a verdict of guilty and to hand down its sentence.
Happily for the rustler, the modern jury didn't order him strung up. But that may not be a great deal of comfort to the criminal. The jury sentenced him to 99 years in prison!
They say you "don't mess with Texas." Apparently, Texas is also not a place to mess with cattle that don't belong to you.