Dan Reid, the fourteen-year-old nephew of the Lone Ranger, had arranged to meet his masked friend and Tonto in the town of Mapville. He reached there ahead of schedule, put his horse, Victor, in the stable and then rented a room in the hotel. Several men sat around the stove in the hotel lobby. Two of them were not much older than Dan, but it was a grizzled older man who hailed Dan to come over and join him and the 'tenderfeet' (the young men).