John Walker is a frontier bandit and gang leader, a xenophobe set on keeping the territory clear of the Chinese immigrants he despises. He knows the legend that sounding a chapel bell ten times summons the wandering vigilante called the Ten Rings, and he turns it into a snare. When one of his men loses count firing rounds into the bell, Walker puts the tenth shot in himself, completing the call not to seek aid but to bait an ambush. The hero answers as promised. Shang-Chi arrives while Kate Bishop slips in behind the gang, and the trap collapses at once. Shang-Chi tosses his hat into the air, and between his martial arts and Kate's gunwork, the entire posse is cut down before he catches it.

Subdued in the wreckage of his own plan, Walker turns from threat to source. Pressed for the whereabouts of the Hood, the crime lord seizing Chinese workers across the territory, he gives up the trail toward Point Pegasus and warns that the Hood will come looking before long. That is the whole of his part in the hunt. He opens the road that carries Shang-Chi and Kate toward the truth, then falls away, a small-time predator overrun the instant he grabbed for something larger than he could hold.