Heyes and Curry confront Turner whose rage at being held in Mexico, not drawing wages, while the alcalde investigates the murder, convinces them of his innocence. Heyes sums up the situation — if it wasn’t Curry and it wasn’t Turner, then it has to be Margaret Carruthers.
The boys head out to pay Margaret a visit. As they admire her villa from a nearby hilltop, Heyes spies Meg Parker in a buggy on the road below. At the time, Heyes didn’t think Meg’s story of traveling around the world was peculiar, but now he does.
That evening at the alcalde’s dinner party, Margaret Carruthers chats with Curry, who dutifully brings up Lexington. The alcalde watches Margaret closely. She seems surprised that Hanley was from her hometown, but denies knowing him.
Meanwhile, Heyes dines with Meg Parker in the hotel restaurant. Meg enthusiastically recounts her adventure of the day — watching the fisherman return with their catch. Heyes asks if she saw any of the countryside, but Meg claims she didn’t have time.
Curry and Heyes are out for an evening stroll, comparing notes. Heyes is sure Meg is lying while Curry reluctantly believes Margaret is telling the truth. A gunshot interrupts their conversation. Heyes grabs Curry’s arm and pulls him down to safety behind a log. A second shot takes off Curry’s hat. Heyes shoots back at the unseen assailant. When the excitement is over, Curry wonders if being shot at is good or bad. “If you don’t get killed,” Heyes assures him, “I think it’s good.”
The boys wake up the alcalde to tell him of this latest event. They wait up until he returns with news: Turner was playing poker, Margaret Carruthers returned to her villa after the dinner party. When pressed, the alcalde admits she could have left again. Also, Mrs. Hanley arrived on the ten o’clock stage.
In the morning the boys visit Mrs. Hanley. She believes Curry killed her husband and is getting away with it. Shocked at his suggestion that she shot at him, her attitude softens when he tells her about Margaret Carruthers, whom Mrs. Hanley remembers she once met.
Curry and Mrs. Hanley call on Margaret. Margaret recalls meeting Mrs. Hanley years ago, but points out that she has changed. Mrs. Hanley feels Miss Carruthers has changed, too, so much so that she’d never have recognized her. Margaret now admits she was acquainted with Rolf Hanley, but didn’t wish to become involved in the investigation. She hadn’t seen him since she was eighteen and that’s why she lied.
Meanwhile, Meg Parker, not feeling well, has breakfast in bed. Heyes sends flowers along with a note asking to see her. Meg is delighted to have his company.
Curry and Mrs. Hanley ride back to town discussing the mysterious Margaret Carruthers. Mrs. Hanley is not certain she’s the same woman she met back in Lexington.
Heyes challenges Meg on the subject of her visiting Margaret Carruthers. Meg explains she heard there was an American woman living nearby, so she went to call on her, unannounced. Unfortunately, she wasn’t home.
The police are waiting as Curry pulls the buggy to a stop in front of the stable, and he is again taken into custody.
Heyes storms into the jail, demanding to talk to the alcalde. Curry has been arrested because a witness saw him at the Punta Piedras cliffs the night Hanley was murdered. Curry’s trial will be short and if he’s convicted, a firing squad will shoot him.
Heyes bows his head in defeat. Curry exhorts him to do something, but Heyes is out of ideas. For what it’s worth Curry offers Mrs. Hanley’s doubts about Margaret Carruthers. Heyes brightens. He’d been wondering why Mrs. Parker suddenly became bedridden.
Heyes brings Mrs. Hanley to meet Meg Parker, whom Mrs. Hanley immediately recognizes as the Margaret Carruthers she met in Lexington ten years ago. Meg protests. She’s never been to Kentucky, her maiden name is Stanfill and she grew up in Ohio. Heyes attempts to persuade Meg to tell the truth before Thaddeus is convicted of murder, but Meg still insists she’s never seen Mrs. Hanley before in her life. Heyes leaves her with one last thought. “Whatever it is you’re hiding, is it important enough to let a man die for it?”
Mrs. Hanley rides out to Margaret Carruthers’s villa. To prove her identity, Margaret pulls out her birth certificate and passport, then agrees to accompany Mrs. Hanley to the alcalde’s office, determined to meet this woman who claims to be her.
Heyes arrives at the villa and learns from the housekeeper that the two women are on their way to town. He hurries after them.
Mrs. Hanley is surprised when Margaret drives past the road to Santa Marta. She suspects they are going the wrong way and is proven correct when Margaret hits her with the butt of her whip and pushes her out of the buggy. Margaret is prevented from continuing her attack by Heyes’s arrival.
In the alcalde’s office, Margaret denies attacking Mrs. Hanley, suggesting that perhaps her grief over her husband’s death has affected her mind and caused her to tell such lies. Heyes enters with Meg Parker in tow. She’s finally ready to tell the whole story.
Meg read of Rolf Hanley’s death in a Lexington newspaper. She was surprised to read that Margaret Carruthers, formerly of Lexington, was now living in Santa Marta because she is Margaret Carruthers. Recently widowed, she was free to come to see who was using her identity and why. Margaret angrily informs the alcalde that Meg tried to blackmail her, a charge Meg admits. Margaret is really Elizabeth Carter, an old schoolmate who ran off with outlaw Charles Morgan when she was eighteen. She killed Morgan’s brother, stole a huge sum of money from the gang and disappeared. At this, Margaret jumps up in rage and tries to throttle Meg until Heyes and a policeman separate them.
Heyes goes to the jail and gives Curry the good news. He brought off a miracle.
That night Curry relaxes in a bathtub while Heyes mends the bullet hole in Curry’s derby and finishes the story of Elizabeth Carter. She had a lot of stolen money and an angry outlaw gang on her tail. She decided to move to Mexico, which takes papers. She helped herself to her friend Margaret Carruthers’s birth certificate and assumed her identity. Rolf Hanley, learning that his old friend lived in Santa Marta, paid her a surprise visit and instead found Elizabeth Carter, whom he also knew.
Mrs. Hanley, realizing that her husband never had a chance to pay Curry, offers the boys a job. She’s taking the filly on to Rancho Verde for breeding and she needs both a bodyguard and a chaperone. The boys happily accept.
GUEST CAST
CRAIG STEVENS — ROLF HANLEY
NICO MINARDOS — ALCALDE (SEÑOR CORDOBA)
INA BALIN — MARGARET CARRUTHERS
PATRICIA CROWLEY — MEG PARKER
JOANNA BARNES — MRS. HANLEY
FERNANDO ESCANDON — CLERK
CHARLES TYNER — TURNER
STEVEN GRAVERS — BOOKIE
GREG WALCOTT — SAM BLEEKER
RUDY DIAZ — FIRST POLICEMAN
REF SANCHEZ — STABLEMAN
HENRY CARR — PORTER
QUETA DE ACUNA — MARGARET CARRUTHERS’ SERVANT
It’s no secret that Roy Huggins often recycled stories. Glen Larson recalls, “I didn’t always know the genesis of some of the ideas he was spinning…I didn’t have the historical warehouse that he did in his head.” [50] Huggins did indeed have a phenomenal memory, not only for his own work, but also apparently for everything he ever read. The genesis of his stories could be anything from a con game learned in military school to a single chapter in the middle of a Mark Twain novel. It’s amazing to see how different the end results could be when the same basic germ of an idea was used in different settings.
“Miracle at Santa Marta” is a story Huggins borrowed from himself. In this case, he went through that historical mental warehouse and pulled out the very first story he ever wrote — a novel called The Double Take, published in 1946. Author Max Allan Collins, who was instrumental in giving Huggins the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991, once commented that The Double Take was “undoubtedly the most-filmed private eye novel ever.” Besides the movie based on the novel, Huggins used it on almost every series he produced from M
averick to City of Angels to The Rockford Files. [51]
The novel is a contemporary Chandler-esque hard-boiled detective story, yet Huggins and writer Dick Nelson were able to turn the same basic story into a believable western. In the novel, detective Stuart Bailey is hired to look into the background of a woman whose husband has been approached by a blackmailer. What seems a simple case soon becomes a tangle of changing identities. When the story is finally resolved, Bailey has learned that Ellen, a gangster’s wife, stole a large sum of money from him, then disappeared. She hid in plain sight as a student at UCLA, but to gain admittance to the school she needed a good high school transcript. She wrote to her school and requested, not her transcript, but that of classmate Margaret Bleeker, and assumed her identity. In “Miracle at Santa Marta,” it’s Elizabeth Carter assuming classmate Margaret Carruthers’s identity to escape from the angry outlaws. Huggins gave a secret nod to his novel by keeping the name Margaret for the stolen identity and giving the sore loser of the horse race the name Bleeker.
The desire to change one’s life is a common thread to both stories, one which fits well within the tenets of the amnesty deal so instrumental in changing Curry and Heyes from outlaws to law-abiding citizens. Because Huggins preferred to avoid violence whenever possible in Alias Smith and Jones, Elizabeth Carter came to a better end than Ellen, who was killed at the end of The Double Take.
21 Days to Tenstrike
“That’s where the money was kept.”
Hannibal Heyes
STORY: JOHN THOMAS JAMES
TELEPLAY: IRVING PEARLBERG AND JOHN THOMAS JAMES
DIRECTOR: MEL FERBER
SHOOTING DATES: NOVEMBER 30, DECEMBER 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 1971
ORIGINAL US AIR DATE: JANUARY 6, 1972
ORIGINAL UK AIR DATE: APRIL 2, 1973
Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry meander through the countryside, stopping at a water hole to allow their horses to drink and nibble grass. Watching them, Curry wonders what kind of a meal he can afford and counts his money, coming up with sixty-eight cents. Heyes, without even looking, knows he only has forty-one cents.
Two men on horseback approach and ask what they’re doing on private property. If the boys are on their way to Smoketree, they won’t find jobs there because of the depression. The strangers ask whether they’ve done any ranch work or trail driving. Only when they couldn’t avoid it, Heyes replies, although they have had experience on the Chisholm Trail in ’73 and ’74.
The men introduce themselves as trail boss Jake Halloran and Terence Tynan, owner of the property. Tynan is hiring hands to drive a herd of cattle north. Are they interested? When the boys learn that the herd is headed for Tenstrike, Colorado, and has to be there in twenty-one days, they decline but Tynan offers a bonus of $400 if they make it on time. Given the lucrative incentive, Heyes and Curry sign on.
A short while later, the drive begins. Two thousand head of cattle head across the plain, raising great clouds of dust.
The first evening, the drovers play poker around the campfire. With no money, Heyes and Curry sit out the game, but Heyes thinks he recognizes Ralph and Bud, two of the players. He worries he might have encountered them while robbing a train.
Next day, the drive continues. That evening in camp, Ralph approaches Jones with news that he’ll be riding drag the next day. Curry understood his position was to be on flank and decides to verify the change with Jake, the boss. Ralph grabs his arm to stop him; he doesn’t want the positions switched back. Curry turns, Ralph punches him. A fistfight ensues with Gantry the cook and the other drovers rooting for Ralph. Heyes grimaces at the beating Curry is taking. When swinging fists endanger the chuck wagon supplies, Jake stops the fight. He should have told Curry about the job switch. Ralph had never been on a drive and didn’t realize how much dust he’d be eating as drag man, so when he asked to switch, Jake decided to rotate the men.
Curry sarcastically thanks Heyes for the support he didn’t give. Heyes replies he wouldn’t want him to back a loser, would he? Mrs. Tynan comes by with an offer of iodine and compliments Jones on his still handsome, though bruised, face. She’s seen Ralph in other disputes and no one’s been able to hold his own against him before.
When she leaves, Heyes shakes his head, incredulous. Only two days out and Curry’s gotten beat up, made an enemy and the boss’s wife “has got her big brown eyes pointed right at you. And only nineteen more days to go!”
Another day passes, running the herd. Curry, a bandanna covering his nose and mouth, rides drag.
At supper, Gantry, on Ralph’s side in the fight, serves Curry less than a tablespoon of stew. Heyes, meanwhile, worries that, if they recognize Ralph and Bud, they may in turn have been recognized.
Early on day four, Jake awakens the crew. When Ralph doesn’t respond, Jake rolls him over and finds a stiletto-sized wound in his chest. Jake first suspects Jones killed him, but no one has seen him or anyone else with such a weapon. A search for it proves fruitless. With no time to lose, Tynan suggests they bury Ralph and go on, planning to tell the sheriff in Tenstrike. Because Jones is still the most likely suspect, Jake has him tied up in the chuck wagon.
That day, Curry is jostled about as the wagon bumps over rocks and into ruts. Heyes comes by to talk and Curry thinks he should run away when they untie him to eat. They can’t go into Tenstrike or they’ll be found out as Heyes and Curry. His partner reminds him that, if he runs, authorities will add a murder charge to his record. They have to figure out who killed Ralph.
Checking the map with Jake, Tynan is dismayed to see how much time they’ve lost with two men out of the drive. If he doesn’t make the delivery date, he’ll go bankrupt. But Jake figures that if Jones were not tied up, he’d be gone anyway.
Gantry bangs on a pan indicating that supper’s ready. As they eat, Curry complains to Heyes about riding in the wagon and wishes he would come up with the name of the murderer. Heyes has seven suspects, the trick is to narrow it down to one.
For sleeping, Curry’s leg is shackled to a wagon wheel. When Jake begins his wake-up call the next morning, he finds Bud dead of a similar stiletto wound. Over his grave, Gantry eulogizes Bud and Ralph and promises their killer won’t be far behind.
The killer, Gantry suspects, is Mr. Tynan. He figures Tynan heard the rumors about Mrs. Tynan “carrying on” with Ralph and then Bud. Maybe the rumors weren’t true, but people believed them anyway. Tynan admits he heard the rumors but considered them only “dirty bunkhouse stories.” Even if he did believe them, he didn’t kill the men because if they don’t make Tenstrike on time, he loses everything. Jake will post a guard all night, each man having a two-hour shift.
Sitting with mugs of coffee, Curry wonders if Heyes knows who the killer is yet. Heyes is working on it, he’s eliminated Curry — “I appreciate that, Heyes” — and himself “’cause I’m the one doing the eliminating.” He figures the new hands didn’t do it; that leaves the remaining three ranch hands, Mr. and Mrs. Tynan, Jake and Gantry. Curry feels that Gantry was too broken up; it wasn’t him. Then Heyes eliminates Jake just because he has to believe in the trail boss.
Next morning, Jake awakens the sleeping guard and orders him to wake the others. As he rousts them, the guard finds Phil dead. The drovers gather around and Jake tells everyone that Gantry predicted Phil would be next because the bunkhouse rumors also included him. Jake told Phil he could leave the drive but the drover felt safe because the rumors weren’t true.
As a precaution against another murder, Tynan posts two guards on duty each night and if no one gets enough sleep to get the herd to Tenstrike, he’s resigned to the loss. Heyes suggests another search, this time in places they didn’t look before.
They overturn saddles, check rifle barrels and empty coffeepots. No stiletto.
The drive continues.
Another campfire, another supper. Heyes and Curry go for a walk so they can talk privately. Curry has found the stiletto hidden in the bushy tail of a horse in the remuda, but short
of someone confessing, it doesn’t solve their problem. They can’t go into Tenstrike and be part of a trial where they swear their names are Smith and Jones. But if they ride off without collecting their pay, they’ll also be suspected. Heyes has to come up with the killer, then they have to ride off without collecting their pay.
On the nineteenth evening, Jake and the Tynans check the map again. Despite the delays, they are fairly certain of making the deadline.
Gantry ambles over to Heyes and Curry with the coffeepot. He apologizes for the way he treated Jones in the beginning. Having earned his friendship, Curry asks Gant if anyone ever tempted him to the tune of $20,000. Heyes explains the killer knows they are worth that. Though they’ve mended their evil ways, banks and railroads would pay a reward for them.
Gant is surprised. Why did they rob banks? Because “that’s where the money was kept,” Heyes quips. They won’t tell Gant who they really are, but admit they found the stiletto and suspect their trail boss Jake. They lay out how they figure it happened: Ralph and Bud recognized them, maybe from a train robbery, and told Jake. He didn’t want to split the reward, so he murdered them. Then he killed Phil to prove Gantry right about the rumors involving Mrs. Tynan. Gantry is remorseful that it may be his fault Phil is dead, but Curry makes him promise not to use the stiletto on Jake except as evidence.
Jake calls Gant away from the confab, wondering what it’s all about. Gant fibs that he thought he saw Jones show Smith the stiletto.
When morning dawns, Jake checks for the stiletto he hid in the pony’s tail. Gantry approaches and accuses him of the murders. When Jake pulls out his gun, Gantry shoots him.
Mr. Tynan doesn’t believe Gantry’s story and assigns Jones the task of turning him over to the Tenstrike sheriff. As they ride together on the chuck wagon, Gantry says he wasn’t sure of their story because he liked Jake. He had to prove it to himself. If the law can show that Jake owned a stiletto, then he won’t be in trouble. Either way, Smith and Jones can collect their pay.
Alias Smith & Jones Page 29