Fate guides the Lone Ranger and his Indian friend Tonto, to a mountain cave for shelter in a storm. Their grim discovery is that cave marks the beginning of events tat ultimately save the nation. Rodney Dornick, while enjoying the respect of his fellow townsmen of Bitter Spring, is secretly working out a fanatically ambitious and diabolically clever plot to seize for himself all the land west of the Mississippi.

When Red Raven and his band of thugs take over San Francisco's notorious Barbary Coast, event he Governor is powerless to halt the wave of crime that follows in their wake. In despair, he appeals to the one man who may be able to uphold the Code of the West. And so, from the wide open prairies to the waterfront dives of San Francisco come the Lone Ranger and his trusty Indian friend, Tonto. Disguised as Clipper, the piratical sailor, the masked man succeeds in gaining Red Raven's confidence to the extent of becoming his his right-hand man. This creates new dangerous in the quest for evidence against the gang, for jealous underlings do everything in their power to rid themselves of their rival. Only the quick thinking of Tonto and the unsuspected bravery of Dipsy-do, the timid little derelict, save the Lone Ranger from being shanghaied or worse.

The Lone Ranger on Red Butte Trail by Fran Striker