Cattle rustling is among the oldest crimes in Texas yet never seems to fade into the frontier past. In May, an accused rustler hit a ranch in southern Bastrop County, when he took off with 11 cows to sell at an auction barn in Lockhart, according to a special ranger.

Charles Holmes, 56, had been employed by a property owner with ranchland along Texas 21. He had been entrusted to tend to a few dozen head of cattle that grazed on the property, but after the owner fired him, he tried his hand at the age-old crime, said Kenny Murchison, a special ranger with the Texas and Southwest Cattle Raisers Association. The 11 beeves won him $7,500 at auction, and for a while the missing cattle went unnoticed.

Two weeks later Holmes, this time with his associate Christopher Hill in tow, went for a second taking, officials said. Together they are accused of loading up 10 calves to take to the Lockhart auction barn again, where they netted around $4,700.

In early October, Murchison arrested Holmes and Hill, 45. They each face felony rustling charges that, if convicted, could land them in jail for several years.

Murchison said he had been sitting on the warrants issued for Holmes' and Hills' arrests for a little while. Murchison was first contacted about the case in late May, and a day later he had learned their names — the men presented drivers licenses in their own name at the auction barn.

All Murchison had to do was wait for one of them to return from a Florida vacation before arresting them, he said. He figured that if he arrested one, the other would never return.

“Holmes met me under the pretense of signing some papers. I called and asked him if he’d be willing to meet me somewhere to sign some papers,” Murchison said. “I wasn’t trying to be a wise guy, I just didn’t want him to disappear.”

Holmes and Hill became two of the 700 to 800 cattle rustling cases the cattle raisers association investigates per year in the state with the largest cattle population in America — about 12.5 million, according to the latest count by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Over the past 10 years, the association’s 30 officers, who are deputized by the Texas Department of Public Safety as special rangers, have investigated 8,500 cases. And there’s no evidence that the crime will ever be phased out.

“It happens more than we ever know — that’s the problem,” said owner of Lockhart Auctions Bubba Bennight, adding that his auction barn sees about one caught rustler per year. “A lot of times people don’t’ even know what happened or where they went. There’s going to be one or so caught a year, but I’m sure there’s others that sneak by and we never know it.”

Unloading stolen bovine through auction barns is the most common technique among rustlers. Many of the animals sold at auction are shipped off to feed lots and mixed into herds that make them irretrievable.

“That night they leave the sale barn, and within a day or two they are usually either in the Panhandle of Texas or Oklahoma,” Bennight said.

Typically, cattle owners are only given restitution if a case ends in a conviction, which, Murchison said, happens “more often than not.”