Crossover of the Week

Spring 1876

SOUL OF THE EAST 

 The Lone Ranger and Tonto deliver some outlaws to Marshal Dave Bliss, who is grateful he listened to Marshal County and trusted them. One of the best witnesses against the outlaws was killed in a gunfight with Swifty Morgan. Bliss says Morgan is one of the fastest guns, along with Herod, Mortimer, Grimm, Hickok, Holliday, and the Ranger himself. The Ranger, Tonto, and an Asian man whose life they saved are confronted by Sheriff Amos Polk, who will soon be leaving his post to become a judge. The Japanese man, Sora Nagamasa, tells the Ranger his would-be killers’ client, Clive Cooper, is one of the junior partners of the Cooper-Tillman Company, an American trading firm based in China, who are treated as underlings by the most powerful company there, Struans. Nagamasa is really Sora Minamoto, spy and soldier for the Emperor of Japan, who usually works under the shortened version of his name, Moto. 

Short story by Frank Schildiner in The Lone Ranger and Tonto: Frontier Justice, Matthew Baugh, ed., Moonstone Books, 2018. Marshal Dave Bliss is from the movie Hang 'Em High. Marshal County is the father of the title character of the television series The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Swifty Morgan is from the movie Support Your Local Gunfighter. John Herod is from the movie The Quick and the Dead. Colonel Douglas Mortimer is from the film For a Few Dollars More. Judge Amos Polk is from the TV movies The Over-the-Hill Gang and The Over-the-Hill Gang Rides Again. The Cooper-Tillman Company and Struan and Sons are from James Clavell’s Tai-Pan. Sora Minamoto is an ancestor of John P. Marquand’s Japanese spy Mr. Moto, who appears under the name Minamoto in Schildiner’s chapbook Watch Your Back, Mr. Minamoto.

This crossover writeup is one of hundreds included in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, which will be published by Meteor House! All three volumes are AUTHORIZED companions to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!