Goodbye Buffalo Sky

This is a frontier tale related by two adolescents entangled in a racist struggle between settlers and Indians. All the traditional ingredients of the western appear here: a lurking murderer's flaming arrows, a philosophical itinerant salesman, a cavalry patrol with handsome young officers, a lovable drifter with a dubious past, a beautiful squaw torn between two or three cultures, even a lethal dose of fire water. Yet the author has managed to blend these elements into a fresh and compelling yarn, its strangeness enhanced by the youthful, wistful conversational simplicity of the narration.