The Biggest Game in the West

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.