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"He was Comanche, and he was known among the People as Buffalo Caller. Once in a time of hunger, when he was a fledgling on one of his first hunts, the older and more experienced men had ridden their horses to exhaustion without scaring up so much as one lone, lame bull. But Buffalo Caller, riding alone, had heard a faint and distant bellow. He had responded in the voice of a buffalo, and the buffalo had answered him....."

This is the opening of The Buckskin Line by Elmer Kelton. The story opens with a Comanche raid on a settlement, in which a red-haired boy of about three years is taken captive, and later rescued. The boy grows up to be Rusty Shannon, a young man who after the murder of his foster father, likely by a man who disagreed with the foster father's opinion that the state of Texas ought not secede from the Union, is sent off to join a ranging company, the forerunner of the Texas Rangers.

Rusty must fight not only hostile Indians, but pro-Confederacy zealots who want to hang all who support the Union. And it's not only himself he must protect, but the Monahan family, the family of his girl, Geneva, who like his own foster father are pro-Union.

This book is a fine Western by an author who won the Spur Award more than once, and is a great book to start with if you are new to Westerns. It's a clean read and does not contain anti-Christian biases--- in fact, one character in the book is a circuit-riding preacher.