If I had no knowledge of Gunsmoke's future trajectory, this episode would have worried me, because I would have been afraid that perhaps the annoying little kid who was this week's guest star was going to become part of the cast and that Gunsmoke would devolve into The Rifleman, where Chuck Connors' annoying onscreen child was always cloying up the works.
Of course, that never happened. In circa 1960 America, middle class eyebrows would raise at the idea of a thirty something man running around perpetually single and childless in the old west. Fortunately, Marshal Dillon has always had an excuse to not be matrimonially entangled - His profession is too dangerous to have anybody depending upon him.
Dillon runs across the scene of a house fire where the only adult resident is dead and the little girl living there is left unharmed but homeless. The man who died was her stepfather and her mother is dead. So Dillon takes the girl to Dodge City to find a home for her, but, alas, many of the women have left town for the week and the girl runs away from the home of the woman who is in town and wants to care for her. She prefers Dillon as a father figure, but then a jail is not a good home for a child AND Dillon is a single man in a dangerous profession.
This is the second episode I've seen that Dennis Weaver (Chester) has directed. I don't know if he picked the script, but he could have used a better showcase for his directorial talents.
There is one rather funny scene in this episode. Dillon first takes the little girl to Ma Smalley, who runs a boarding house. The handyman tells Dillon that she and many of the town's other women have gone to Wichita to talk about "suffering". Dillon asks him if he means "suffrage". The man replies - Just wait until women have had the vote for awhile! You'll see what suffering is!"