- [first lines]
- Bret Maverick: [narrating] The game of poker has only one serious drawback. You can lose. Denver hadn't been very lucky for me. I'd been second best every night for a week, to where paying my hotel bill was a tight squeeze.
- [Bret marches into the hotel lobby wearing prison stripes]
- Hotel Clerk: Those clothes, Mr. Maverick, are you going to a masquerade?
- Bret Maverick: Oh, no. No. The gallows.
- Bret Maverick: [narrating] A man in convict stripes without a penny to his name has his problems. Like finding a job. The next five hours were the hardest. But it doesn't take much of a job to get a professional man started back in the work he knows best.
- [cut to Maverick playing in a penny-ante poker game]
- [Bret is investigating a bank robbery]
- Newspaperman: Why do you ask? Reward?
- Bret Maverick: Well, it still stands, doesn't it?
- Newspaperman: Five percent of the take. Need a partner, son?
- Bret Maverick: No, thanks.
- Newspaperman: Know too much to split, eh?
- Bret Maverick: No. Know too little.
- [Bret is caught leaning over the body of a man with a knife sticking out of back]
- Flora: Nice goin', handsome.
- Bret Maverick: I didn't do this.
- Flora: No. He committed suicide.
- Bret Maverick: [narrating] Being held for a murder I hadn't committed was one thing, but being held while 120,000 dollars was about to be dug up was something else entirely. No man wants to hang poor.