- SEED OF DECEPTION
Original Airdate: April 13, 1958
Synopsis. The townspeople of Bonita welcome Bret and Bart with open arms―they believe that the Mavericks are Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, and that they’ve arrived in town to take care of Jim Mundy and his gang of troublemakers. The sheriff of Bonita thinks that Mundy is planning to rob the payroll of a nearby mining company from the bank, and he knows that the town will lose the company’s business if Mundy is successful. The Mavericks try to stay out of the matter, but Bret becomes involved after Bart is shot by a henchman of Mundy’s who believed Bart had stumbled onto their plan.
Adele Mara, who was married to Maverick creator and producer Roy Huggins for nearly fifty years, stars in this episode as a professional dancer whose role in the scheme is to cause a diversion by dancing in the bar precisely when Mundy and his boys are drilling a hole through the floor of their hotel room, which is located directly above the bank vault. For the dance scene, Mara wore a diaphanous costume that prompted one irate viewer to write Roy Huggins with a complaint about putting a “half-naked woman” on network television. Huggins replied, “That was no half-naked woman… that was my wife.”
Synopsis. In New Mexico, Bart wins ownership of the Lucky Lady cantina, only to learn that the property may have been built by a wealthy family of Portuguese descent that is laying claim to the land.