Rustling and thievery doesn’t make em some kind of heros to me. You don’t get to just claim ownership of a few thousand dollars worth of cattle belonging to someone else, which stray onto your land. And kudos to the duputies who didn’t feel the pressing need to shoot it out with em when they showed up armed to try to keep their ill gotten gains.
They found a way to catch them unarmed later.
Historically we used to do a lot worse to cattle thieves in this country