Top-rated
Thu, Jan 6, 1972
Unable to find work , Heyes and Curry accept a rancher's offer of pay if they can help herd cattle to a Colorado town. Soon, one of the cattle hands is dead - and suspicion falls upon Curry. The next night, it happens again. Then again. Someone isn't who - or what - they pretend to be
Top-rated
Thu, Jan 13, 1972
'Big Mac' MacCreedy hires Smith and Jones to steal it (again ) -the Cesar's bust from Arminderez but Heyes refuses (but agrees to teach one of MacCreedy's men how to do it , instead.) Heyes and Curry agree to escort the bust from a pre-arranged going spite too San Fransisco, where is to be auctioned. Whilst Heyes and Curry wait at the town near three deep-spot, they meet the town bully. Though they keep backing down, the bully keeps pushing, and Curry starts losing his temper.
Thu, Jan 20, 1972
While playing cards on a train with banker Chester Powers, our heroes are recognized by another banker, Winford Fletcher (the villain of "Dreadful Sorry, Clementine," Fletcher pulls a gun on the group and says the 2 cost him a great deal of money to get out of trouble (apparently, he bought his way out of prison time on top of being swindled for $50,000). Powers bluffs Fletcher with a hidden "gun" and Fletcher backs down. That gives Powers an idea. He has speculated with and lost all the securities and bonds in his bank. The cash is still there, but there will be a run on the bank if word of his other losses gets out. So he robs the bank himself and ... you got it ... pins it on Heyes and Curry, giving them a chunk of the money to buy their silence. The boys pretend to accept, but scheme to pit Powers and Fletcher - who have reached a secret deal to jointly testify against Heyes and Curry - against each other. They take their share of the stolen money and give it to Fletcher in return for his testimony that they DIDN'T rob the bank when it was knocked over a second time (which is exactly what they do). Now to get Powers and Fletcher, along with U.S. Treasury agents, into the fray with one another ...
Top-rated
Thu, Jan 27, 1972
Heyes and Curry are captured by a farm family and brought into Hadleyburg. The farmer wants the bounty money, but has a change of heart and helps them escape. That puts the farmer and his wife into very hot water and make Heyes and Curry very ashamed. Help comes from detective Harry Briscoe, who's investigating a crooked gambling house in another town. Heyes goes to the house and plays blackjack, notices a marked deck at the start of the card game, and gets it replaced with an unmarked deck. He counts the cards in the old sharpie's trick and only making big bets when the deck is near the bottom and he can tell what he's likely to get on the last few hands. Briscoe watches incognito as Heyes wins $32,000. After realizing that Heyes is counting cards, the casino manager orders regular shuffles of the deck, at which time Heyes stops playing and reveals a collection of marked decks that the casino has hidden. Briscoe steps forward and busts the casino owner and dealer. With the money, Heyes and Curry go on a spending spree all over Hadleyburg, making so many civic improvements to the town that it's impossible to field a jury that hasn't been touched by their generosity (smooth lawyer Adam West helps out as well). When Briscoe is called to the stand, he testifies that Heyes and Curry came by the money honestly and are doing all this just to be nice. The judge does not direct an acquittal, rather, the farmer and his wife are pronounced "not guilty" by the jury.
Thu, Feb 3, 1972
On a lazy Sunday afternoon, Curry and Heyes (now played by Roger Davis) relax in a gully when a satchel of money literally lands in their laps, thrown from a passing carriage. Heyes opens it and finds $200,000 -- every bill of it a bad counterfeit. Heyes thinks it over for a few seconds and then comes up with a brilliant plan. After shaving off his mustache (Roger Davis had one in real life; after the first day of filming, Universal executives told Davis the mustache looked "sinister" and Roy Huggins wrote the comment into a scene where Heyes shaves), Joshua Smith goes to a bank and asks to put the satchel in a safety-deposit box for the time being. He and Thaddeus Jones are wealthy land buyers, he says, and he wants people to know he has enough money to buy his way into anything. That includes a famous weekly poker game where all the big ranchers join once a week. The banker spreads the word, and Smith is quickly invited to the game, where he soon wins $35,000. But that's when two members of the Devil's Hole Gang (Kyle McMurtry and a masked, non-speaking extra filling in as Wheat Carlson) raid the game and clear the table. That's bad enough, but the banker has also looked inside the safe deposit box and found the money. He threatens to denounce Smith and Jones to the ranchers, and meanwhile the local sheriff has picked up on the name "Wheat" and is looking for the other members of the Devil's Hole Gang, which of course include Heyes and Curry. Our heroes' only chance is for Curry to ride ninety to nothing to Devil's Hole and get the other ranchers' share -- which also equals $200,000 -- back while leaving them the amount Heyes won before the robbery. Then Heyes opens the banker's safe, takes out the counterfeit money and replaces it with the real stuff, which a U.S. Treasury agent verifies. As soon as the Treasury agent leaves, Heyes rushes the $200,000 back to the poker table (minus a $100 bill he dropped and stuck in his pocket), sticks the bad money in the Treasury agent's satchel, and hightails it with Curry to a freight train just before the sheriff figures things out. About two-thirds of this episode was re-shot over four and a half days of filming to replace Pete Deuel's scenes (Davis had to exactly mimic him); a few new scenes include the opening titles and a still picture of Smith and Jones getting off a stagecoach.
Thu, Feb 10, 1972
To stop the MacCreedy-Armindariz feud from coming to a rope's end, Heyes and Curry ride to the aid of their former employer Patrick "Big Mac" MacCreedy, who is accused of murdering the foreman of his across-the-Rio-Grande neighbor Armindariz's ranch. In fact, MacCreedy only witnessed the shooting and has no idea who the killer is (viewers don't either; the killer is never revealed). While hurrying to help the dying man, MacCreedy saw a neer-do-well drifter (Neville Brand) swipe the man's rifle and take off with it. Heyes and Curry find that the drifter has gone to Tombstone, Arizona -- home to Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, who both play major roles in the story. They acquire a warrant for the drifter's arrest as a material witness, but it's not an extradition warrant. Thus they need to lure or trick the drifter back to Texas. To do so, they ask a lady friend named Georgette Sinclair who is what would later be called a nightclub singer, meeting her in Tombstone and letting her "woo" the drifter while they watch and play poker. The idea is to get the drifter to fall in love with the singer, agree to go to Colorado with her -- stopping for half a minute in Texas along the way.
Thu, Feb 17, 1972
Heyes is cheated at poker by big, obnoxious Wheelwright. Georgette Sinclair, in the second of three appearances, is hired to help Heyes carry out the title phrase, which Heyes utters while leaving. "Wheelwrong" also cheats George and gives her a literal horselaugh when she tries to bewitch him with a string of pearls. The group goes to Silky O'Sullivan, who lent them the necklace to begin with, and after enduring his rage talk him into lending them money to "ransom" the necklace.
Sat, Sep 16, 1972
While evading a posse, the boys run into their old friend, Harry Briscoe (J.D. Cannon in his last appearance on this show), who's been fired by the Bannerman Detective Agency and is now a derelict. They sympathize with him and convince him to use his old credentials to fool the smart sheriff and his dumb deputy by "arresting" them before the posse does. The sheriff lets Briscoe go with Heyes and Curry, but sends the deputy along on the stagecoach to Wyoming. Now to fool the deputy, which is fairly easily done, and to fool the sheriff a second time, which is much harder. Fortunately, they happen upon a pair of bank-robbing killers whom only Briscoe recognizes, and he uses trickery to catch them and get back into the Bannerman Agency's good graces. The ending of this show, as the boys ride through the Utah countryside and chat, was recycled for all subsequent episodes (the boys are filmed in long shot and their dialog was changed for each show). This show and parts of several others were subsequently syndicated under the title "The Long Chase," shown as a TV-movie separate from the series episodes.
Sat, Sep 30, 1972
Patrick "Big Mac" MacCreedy is tired of years of feuding with the neighboring Amandariz family, whose land abuts his own and is occasionally shaped by the Rio Grande. So he hires Heyes and Curry to try to negotiate a settlement. They put on their game faces and have their hats in hand as they visit the Armaendariz mansion, and get the expected rebuff. But there is a new player in the game -- Armandariz's spinster sister, who is even less friendly than he but who has a deeply religious streak. Heyes and Curry play on that, telling her that MacCreedy is a Catholic widower and piling on the soft soap (some of which is actually true). Carlotta, the sister, decides to investigate MacCreedy herself. There may be a way out of the feud after all. This was the writing debut of Juanita Bartlett for Roy Huggins, who brought her over to "The Rockford Files" a couple of years later; he soon left but she stayed for the whole run and worked extensively with Huggins protégé' Stephen J. Cannell before starting her own company as a producer.
Sat, Oct 21, 1972
The first of five episodes to deal with the real-life Wyoming Stockgrower's Association (which led to the Johnson County War of 1892 and inspired the film "Heaven's Gate," which changed many details of the story): two gunmen try to bushwhack Smith and Jones for being in league with "cattle rustlers" -- which in WSGA parlance, applied to anybody who owned fewer than 300 cattle. A small cattle rancher, who has tangled with the gunmen in the past, comes up behind them, surprises them and shoots them down in their tracks. He claims self-defense, but knows people will call it murder (which it is), so asks Smith and Jones to escort him, his wife, his partner and his cattle to Montana where he will be reasonably safe. WSGA "detectives" send out an armed party dedicated to killing the whole lot. When Heyes and the gunman are both critically wounded, Curry goes berserk and blasts away at them until they turn tail. Heyes survives (his comment about being shot in the head later became a tagline for "The Rockford Files"), but the killer dies -- and Curry figures out the truth. Now everyone has a moral dilemma.
Sat, Nov 4, 1972
The disappearance of a young heir to a fortune appears to be a kidnapping for ransom orchestrated by Kid Curry as Thaddeus Jones. At least that's what the heir would like to think. In fact he himself is the kidnapper and Curry is his hostage. The kidnapper has his eye on an eligible bachelorette, whom he plans to woo with the ransom money once it gets out of escrow and is paid. Heyes, who comes into town separately, doesn't know all the details but puts together enough to realize Curry is likely to be murdered and his body dumped in a stream until it rots once the ten days are up. So Heyes decides to woo the eligible bachelorette on his own. He meets up with Doc Holliday, whom he knows from a poker game (Holliday was a great winner at faro but not much of a poker player; Heyes had won $20,000 from him in the earlier game, only to have Wyatt Earp force him to lose it back). Heyes points out the young woman and explains that he wants to court her. He's already swiped a book of poetry and memorized it to appeal to her intellectual instincts; now he wants to prove he's a man of means. So, he proposes that he and Holliday play poker together under the woman's eye. Heyes will "win" Holliday's stash (then give it back immediately once they leave the room) and impress the woman with his money. Holliday surprisingly agrees and the plan goes off. But Heyes must still try to track the woman and her treacherous boyfriend to the hideout where Curry is being held hostage.
Sat, Nov 25, 1972
Had series finales been a staple in 1972, this would have been it. Heyes and Curry get a telegram from Wyoming sheriff Lom Trevors that the Governor has at long last given them amnesty, and rush to meet the sheriff (Western veteran John Russell takes over from Mike Road, who had played the role in the first two seasons and still voiced it in the opening credits). But the day the amnesty came through is also the day the Governor was removed from office (as a territorial governor, he was appointed by the President -- when the Executive Mansion was occupied by a President of a different party, in this case Grover Cleveland, he appointed one of his own party men to the post). The new Governor, George W. Baxter, is a friend of Trevors and agrees to keep the amnesty on the table, and maybe approve it if the boys will track down his missing daughter. Our heroes succeed, but return to find that Baxter has been removed from office ("Seems he fenced in some Federal land"). Trevors doesn't know the new Governor, Charles Midnight. The last words of the episode are a replay of the words spoken in the pilot (and in the opening credits) about the boys keeping their nose clean until the Governor figures they deserve amnesty. A printed crawl over the last shot records the tumultuous history of the Wyoming Territory governors during the period in question (although buffs will spot several flaws: Governor Midnight's name wasn't Charles -- Roy Huggins may have confused him with famous rancher Charles Goodnight; and the period where the gubernatorial merry-go-round took place was in the infamously deadly-cold and stormy winter of 1886-1887 rather than the summer where filming took place).
Sat, Dec 2, 1972
Sorrell "Boss Hogg" Booke has the title role, as a mining-company executive who went from Arizona to Old Mexico to try to settle miners' grievances over unpaid wages, only to be taken hostage in his own right by the miners, who hope to use him as a bargaining chip. A mine supervisor has a particular interest in getting Zulick back to Arizona, but won't explain why. It turns out that Zulick is a lot more valuable than anyone suspected, for reasons that are hidden until nearly the last minute. Another surprise comes when the mine detective turns Heyes and Curry over to the sheriff and then refuses the reward on them in Wyoming, allowing the sheriff to set them free, because he is convinced his debt of gratitude is too great. Ironically, "Bonanza" was also floundering in the ratings in a new time slot against a Norman Lear situation comedy ("All and the Family" was "ASJ"'s nemesis; "Maude" was trouncing "Bonanza"); the two shows would end production and then leave the air less than a week apart.
Sat, Dec 16, 1972
The last episode to be filmed ("Only Three to a Bed," airing four weeks later, was left over from the Utah trip at the beginning of the season) again delves into "Heaven's Gate" territory, albeit less obviously than other episodes. Members of the Wyoming Stock Growers' Association have lynched two small ranchers they accused of rustling. Sheriff Lom Trevors hires the boys to get the two surviving witnesses out of Wyoming and into Nebraska. The WSGA sends a sheriff after them with extradition warrants as material witnesses, and offers them a fat bribe if they promise to perjure themselves and say they didn't see the accused killers. The lynching was based on the 1889 hangings of Jim Averill and Ella "Cattle Kate" Watson, whom Michael Cimino would resurrect as the leads of "Heaven's Gate" -- set three years later.